The biggest influence: "The real father of my planet books is
David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus . . . it was Lindsay who first
gave me the idea that the 'scientification' appeal could be combined with
the 'supernatural' appeal" (Letters, 205). Also, Lewis writes:
"From Lindsay I first learned what other planets in fiction are really
good for; for spiritual adventures. Only they can satisfy the craving which
sends our imaginations off the earth" (cited in Sayer, 153). In addition,
as a child he enjoyed Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. In answer to a fan letter,
Lewis writes: "What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon's
Last and First Men (1931) and an essay in J. B. S. Haldane's
Possible Worlds (1927), both of which seemed to take the idea of such
travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook which I try
to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary idea as mythology
and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) point of view what
has always hitherto been used by the opposite side" (cited in Green
and Hooper, 163). In still another letter he writes: "But the danger
of 'Westonism' I meant to be real. What set me writing the book was the
discovery that a pupil of mine took all that dream of interplanetary colonization
quite seriously, and the realization that thousands of people in one way
or another depend on some hope of perpetuating and improving the human
race for the whole meaning of the universe-that a 'scientific' hope of
defeating death is a real rival to Christianity . . . " (Letters,
166-167).
Publication: Lewis and Tolkien were simultaneously writing Out
of the Silent Planet and The Lost Road (Lewis had proposed to
Tolkien: "Supposing you write a thriller that's a time-journey .
. . and I write one that's a space journey"); both were initially
rejected by publishers. Eventually Bodley Head agreed to publish OSP
and it appeared in 1938. It received sixty reviews (a large number), but
only two reviewers realized the book's connection with Christianity. Lewis
saw an advantage in such theological ignorance and illiteracy: "If
there was only someone with a richer talent and more leisure I think this
ignorance might be a help to the evangelization of England; any amount
of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under cover of romance
without their knowing it" (Letters, 167). Later in 1945 he writes:
"The difficulty we are up against is this. We can [often] make people
attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment
they have gone away from the lecture or laid down our article, they are
plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted.
Every newspaper, film, novel, and textbook undermines our work. As long
as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We
must attack the enemy's line of communication. What we want is not more
little books about Christianity, but more books by Christians on other
subjects-with their Christianity latent" (cited in Sayer, 154).
The famous literary critic, Marjorie Nicolson, wrote in 1948: "OSP
is to me the most beautiful of all cosmic voyages and in some ways the
most moving . . . Earlier writers have created new worlds from legend,
from mythology, from fairy tale. Mr. Lewis has created myth itself, myth
woven of desires and aspirations deep-seated in some, at least, of the
human race . . . As I journey with him into worlds at once familiar and
strange, I experience, as did Ransom, 'a sensation not of following an
adventure but of enacting a myth'" (Voyages to the Moon, 251-55).