"Even if it is a vice to read science fiction, those who cannot understand the very temptation to that vice will not be likely to tell us anything of value about it. Just as I, for instance, who have no taste for cards, could not find anything very useful to say by way of warning against deep play. They will be like the frigid preaching chastity, misers warning us against prodigality, cowards denouncing rashness" (60-61).

Lewis divides science fiction into sub-species, and begins with the "radically bad" one, what he calls "Displaced Persons": "In this sub-species the author leaps forward into an imagined future when planetary, sidereal, or even galactic travel has become common. Against this huge backcloth he then proceeds to develop an ordinary love-story, spy-story, wreck-story, or crime-story. This seems to me tasteless (61). . . . I am, then, condemning not all books which suppose a future widely different from the present, but those which do so without a good reason, which leap a thousand years to find plots and passions which they could have found at home" (62).

"If the former is the fiction of the Displaced Persons, this might be called the fiction of Engineers. It is written by people who are primarily interested in space-travel, or other undiscovered techniques, as real possibilities in the actual universe. They give us in imaginative form their guesses as to how the thing might be done . . . . I am too uneducated scientifically to criticize such stories on the mechanical side; and I am so completely out of sympathy with the projects they anticipate that I am incapable of criticizing them as stories" (63).

"I think it useful to distinguish from these Engineers' Stories a third sub-species where the interest is, in a sense, scientific, but speculative. When we learn from the sciences the probable nature of places or conditions which no human being has experienced, there is, in normal men, an impulse to attempt to imagine them. . . . And of course men have been doing this for centuries. What would Hades be like if you could go there alive? Homer sends Odysseus there and gives an answer (63). . . . Never mind how they got there; we are imagining what it would be like. The first glimpse of the unveiled airless sky, the lunar landscape, the lunar levity, the incomparable solitude, then the growing terror, finally the overwhelming approach of the lunar night--it is for these things that the story (especially in its original and shorter form) exists" (64).

"My next sub-species is what I would call the Eschatological. It is about the future . . . [and] gives an imaginative vehicle to speculations about the ultimate destiny of our species . . . .It is indeed a new form--the pseudo history" (65-66).

"I turn at last to that sub-species in which alone I myself am greatly interested . . . . In it (as also in many other publications of the same type) you will find not only stories about space-travel but stories about gods, ghosts, ghouls, demons, fairies, monsters, etc (67). . . . In this kind of story the pseudo-scientific apparatus is to be taken simply as a 'machine' in the sense which that word bore for the Neo-Classical critics. The most superficial appearance of plausibility--the merest sop to our critical intellect--will do. I am inclined to think that frankly supernatural methods are best. I took a hero once to Mars in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus. Nor need the strange worlds, when we get there, be at all strictly tied to scientific probabilities. It is their wonder, or beauty, or suggestiveness that matter. When I myself put canals on Mars I believe I already knew that better telescopes had dissipated that old optical delusion. The point was that they were part of the Martian myth as it already existed in the common mind" (68-69).

from "On Stories" (1947) in Of Other Worlds

1. What is important in stories is not the excitement or suspense they produce, but instead the atmosphere or sense of being in another world (4, 9, 12).

2. Good stories can be judged by whether we want to re-read them (15).

3. Good stories "awaken" us to what reality may actually be like (15).

4. Good stories do not rely on surprise but on surprisingness (17).

from "On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) and "On Juvenile Tastes" (1958) in Of Other Worlds

5. Give children what you think they like; print a story that originally came from someone "telling" the story to a particular child; "writing a children's story because a children's story is the best art-form for something you have to say" (23, 41).

6. Good stories "last" (24).

7. Adults should not feel silly because they enjoy children's stories (25).

8. Fairy tales are very valuable because they awaken us to a deeper reality (29).

9. Children's stories should not be all sweetness and light (31, 32).

10. Should children's stories have a "moral" (33)?

11. A writer of children's stories should not "write down" to children (34).

from "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's To Be Said" (1956) and "It All Began with a Picture" (1960) in Of Other Worlds

12. Lewis describes his own imaginative process as a bubbling up of mental pictures (35, 36, 42).

from "The Meanings of Fantasy" in An Experiment in Criticism (1961)

13. As a psychological term fantasy has three meanings:

a. "An imaginative construction which in some way or other pleases the patient and is mistaken by him for reality . . . Delusion . . . is of no literary interest" (50-51).

b. "A pleasing imaginative construction entertained incessantly, and to his injury, by the patient, but without the delusion that it is a reality . . . I call this activity Morbid Castle-building" (51).

c. "The same activity indulged in moderately and briefly as a temporary holiday or recreation, duly subordinated to more effective and outgoing activities . . . I call this Normal Castle-building. But this itself can be of two kinds and the difference between them is all-important. They may be called the Egoistic and the Disinterested "(51-52).