Life has ruthlessly broken down all obstacles and liquidated all failures and to-day in her highest form-civilized man-and in me as his representative, she presses forward to that interplanetary leap which will, perhaps, place her for ever beyond the reach of death. Our right to supersede you is the right of the higher over the lower. Your tribal life has nothing to compare with our civilization-with our science, medicine and law, our armies, our architecture, our commerce, and our transport system which is rapidly annihilating space and time. "To you I may seem a vulgar robber, but I bear on my shoulders the destiny of the human race. Speaking to the Oyarsa of Malacandra (Mars), he says: Not satisfied with confinement to Earth, Weston seeks, as Cabal does, to conquer the universe. Weston himself is referred to as "bent," meaning, I think, fallen in his nature and given to pride and other sins (as we all are). The premise is that Earth, called Thulcandra, the Silent Planet of the title, has been quarantined from all others because of the influence of its "bent" Oyarsa, or planetary leader. When he explains himself in Chapter 20, he reminds me of Raymond Massey's character Cabal in Things to Come, which was released in 1936, just two years before this book was published. In Out of the Silent Planet, the villain is Weston. Ransom is the protagonist in The Space Trilogy, yet much of the narrative turns on the actions of its villains (as is so often the case in our popular culture). There is a lot in The Space Trilogy and it's hard to move past some of these things without commenting on them and applying them to issues current in this blog and in our world of today. I shouldn't spend too much time on this, but I'm sure I will. That freshness may have influenced my thoughts on Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945). Things To Come (1936) was still fresh in my mind when I read these books.
I'm going back farther now into the past, into spring when, in a week when I was sick, I read The Space Trilogy by C.S.
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