The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Chronicles #41 ｜ Out Of The Silent Planet with Nick Dixon

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to this episode of Chronicles, where today we're going to be talking all about

00:00:18.640 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. This is actually the first time that we've spoken about

00:00:24.820 C.S. Lewis, dedicated an episode to one of his stories on Chronicles. And so I wanted to bring

00:00:30.900 in a heavyweight C.S. Lewis enthusiast, Nick. Thank you. Yeah. And not my actual weight. He

00:00:37.460 means, of course, my C.S. Lewis. Intellectual heavyweights. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, well,

00:00:43.020 great to be here. And in a way, I wouldn't say I'm a heavyweight, but I do have some expertise

00:00:46.660 on literature because I do have an MA in modern literature, although Lewis would hate modern

00:00:50.220 literature. But I know Carl's quite big on having degrees and stuff. So I do actually have a little

00:00:54.080 bit of expertise and then i'm the world's biggest c.s lewis fan right so that helps as well and i

00:00:58.920 think it's really great to talk about this trilogy because lotus eaters fans will love 0.99

00:01:02.540 at least the third one that hideous strength which is an incredibly prophetic book about our modern

00:01:08.380 political situation and i've even seen tweets recently saying you're not living in 1984 you're

00:01:14.440 not living in a brave new world you're living in that hideous strength so when we get to that one

00:01:18.700 people will resonate with it but we want to be thorough so we have to start we do we like to do

00:01:22.840 things properly here. So we've got to do the whole trilogy. And they are also all great in their own

00:01:26.980 right. They are. They are. I really enjoyed Out of the Silent Planet. It was a slow burn. You know,

00:01:34.220 it was a really slow build. And I suppose as well, because of the nature of the main character,

00:01:42.180 Elwyn Ransom, and, you know, you get into his mind, you share his anxieties about his situation

00:01:48.260 and where all of this is going, you know, you also fall into having those anxieties as well.

00:01:54.880 And so you're as surprised as he is when things don't really turn out to be as he thinks they're

00:02:00.800 going to. But before we get ahead of ourselves on all of that, let's start by talking a little bit

00:02:06.160 about Lewis himself, because obviously he was a lot like many of his writing heroes and the people

00:02:13.960 that had impressed him, you know, who were a generation or two before him.

00:02:18.760 For example, he name-checks H.G. Wells a few times in this novel.

00:02:24.860 Now, obviously, H.G. Wells' philosophy is very, very different to C.S. Lewis's,

00:02:31.120 but it speaks to the fact that they both obviously have a deep fascination

00:02:36.080 with space and the cosmos.

00:02:37.980 Wells was more of the arch-rationalist and materious, the Faustian.

00:02:42.220 Of course, Lewis is coming at it all

00:02:44.000 from a much more theological perspective.

00:02:46.820 Yeah, that's right.

00:02:47.280 I mean, he's very influenced by Wells

00:02:48.780 in terms of the sci-fi, the aesthetics of that

00:02:51.720 and the precedent there.

00:02:53.160 And he acknowledges that at the start

00:02:54.340 and a sort of preface.

00:02:55.180 But he would be very against Wells

00:02:57.240 in terms of the ideology.

00:02:58.100 As you say, Wells believed in a world state.

00:03:01.240 Basically, it was a technocratic globalist.

00:03:03.380 You thought, you know, this will solve everything

00:03:05.700 when we have a rationalist global state.

00:03:08.280 And Lewis, of course, completely against that,

00:03:10.120 which is clear in this book.

00:03:11.380 and in all of his writings yeah yeah c.s lewis has definitely been been acquitted um on this yeah he

00:03:17.660 seems to have been right oh yeah completely right and well's got it wrong yeah yeah and if you read

00:03:22.800 that hideous strand it's even more clear and even in this book out of the silent planet and in the

00:03:26.940 abolition of man uh which is written around this time and these books are the sort of fictionalized

00:03:31.680 version of the some of the themes in that he's completely against the utilitarian materialist

00:03:37.200 technocratic completely against all of that and that comes anytime you hear progressive in a lewis

00:03:43.060 book you know you're about to deal with some evil people the progressive tendency they're called in

00:03:47.880 that hideous trend these people at the university they're called the progressive tendencies you're

00:03:52.300 like right these are going to be the baddies yeah lewis hated anything progressive right and um

00:03:56.880 it's quite an interesting origin of course for this trilogy in particular uh because if i have

00:04:01.880 it right it began uh out of a conversation between lewis and tolkien where they were basically um

00:04:08.880 challenging one another to write some sci-fi stories and so this ended up being the first

00:04:14.000 of lewis's out of the silent planet and i believe tolkien had been working on a time travel story

00:04:19.440 but he didn't actually end up finishing it which is a shame because i'd love to have seen tolkien

00:04:24.240 try his hand at something yeah more in that vein they have a sort of a bet they say lewis says look

00:04:29.620 there's not enough of the stuff we want to read we're gonna have to write it ourselves yeah and

00:04:33.620 Tolkien does a chapter of the time travel uh novel it ends up so he puts it out somewhere in the end

00:04:39.340 and you can read that in one of his I'm not as big on Tolkien as some people I'm better on Lewis but

00:04:44.740 he emerges eventually and it's not in the Silmarillion I think it's another one but he

00:04:49.000 you can find that chapter but that's as far as he got whereas Lewis bangs out three novels yeah

00:04:54.100 and this is just typical of the difference between them because Tolkien famously took 14 years or

00:04:57.740 something to write Lord of the Rings. Very meticulous, extraordinary, far too meticulous

00:05:01.900 for his own good at times. He's writing an elvish alphabet when he's got deadlines,

00:05:06.360 whereas Lewis was bashing out, don't worry too much about little mistakes, things like that. He

00:05:11.640 chucks away all his manuscripts after he's finished, known for throwing out swathes of

00:05:16.060 things. Just a very different type, prodigious, prolific, but a very different type. Both

00:05:21.400 incredible geniuses, basically, but very different. Yeah, and obviously one coming at things from a

00:05:26.900 more Anglican perspective and the other coming at things from a more Catholic perspective as well.

00:05:32.100 Yeah. And that is always there. I mean, people will tell you now, people who like Lewis will

00:05:36.900 say, well, Lewis was reading Chesterton. Lewis was reading Aquinas. Lewis semi-believed in purgatory.

00:05:43.100 He's basically a Catholic. And I've even heard people claim like Peter Craved, who's great,

00:05:46.660 but he sort of claimed, oh, Lewis would have become a Catholic. This is nonsense because

00:05:50.780 he was a fierce anti-catholic, anti-catholic is perhaps too strong, but he was an ulcer man by

00:05:57.200 birth. He said to Tolkien, you don't understand, I was born in Belfast, I can never be Catholic.

00:06:02.860 But also he just, he and Warnie, his brother, would make jokes about Catholics when Tolkien

00:06:08.660 at one point said that he'd taken the name from a guy called Philip Neary. So Tolkien sort of took

00:06:14.220 that as his confirmation name from this Catholic figure. And he mentioned it to Lewis one night,

00:06:20.580 as a sort of bonding thing, like a revealing part of himself.

00:06:23.600 And Lewis apparently stood stiffly and said,

00:06:25.420 I can't think of two persons more dissimilar.

00:06:27.820 So completely shut him down.

00:06:29.860 Tolkien realises from then on,

00:06:30.980 I'm not going to talk about Catholic stuff with Lewis.

00:06:33.760 Another quick anecdote is there at the Inklings, which was there.

00:06:36.620 Sorry, may I just say that?

00:06:37.940 But that is quite strange, right?

00:06:39.700 Because it was Tolkien, of course, who changed Lewis from,

00:06:44.340 converted him from atheism to just a general faith,

00:06:47.940 faith, like actually believing in a higher divinity.

00:06:51.300 You're right.

00:06:51.620 I'm sort of getting ahead of myself.

00:06:52.600 So there's a famous talk between Tolkien and Lewis.

00:06:57.540 I think, is it?

00:06:58.520 It's not Barfield that's there.

00:07:00.200 It's, I think it's Hugo Dyson.

00:07:01.940 Anyway, they're at, they're in the, they're chatting late at night in Oxford and Tolkien

00:07:06.800 conveys to Lewis that Christianity is the one true myth.

00:07:11.220 So it is a myth, but it's true. 0.99

00:07:13.280 And Lewis thought of myths as lies before then.

00:07:15.580 and Tolkien explains to him this theory of the true myth.

00:07:19.000 And he ends up, that's a key part in his conversion.

00:07:22.300 There's several stages to it.

00:07:24.380 Barfield helps him, pointing out things like,

00:07:27.260 if you are getting all your ideas,

00:07:29.300 if your mind is just a collection of atoms,

00:07:31.380 but that's where you're getting all your reasoning from,

00:07:33.240 why should you trust the reasoning of a collection of atoms?

00:07:35.260 Things like that.

00:07:36.640 That pushes him on the way.

00:07:38.220 He goes from being this staunch atheist to a theist,

00:07:41.440 but not a Christian yet,

00:07:42.720 and Tolkien with that conversation amongst other things

00:07:44.780 moves him along to being an actual Christian 0.91

00:07:46.980 and then of course it was Tolkien's

00:07:49.360 hoped that he would become a Catholic 0.97

00:07:50.480 and he was gutted that he remained an Anglican

00:07:53.640 mere Christianity, a basic Anglican 0.95

00:07:55.500 he was very like I'm just going to stick with the basics

00:07:57.380 here, I'm not going to go into anything

00:07:58.980 for those reasons that I said before

00:08:01.640 his background was too dissimilar

00:08:03.240 and so he was never

00:08:05.620 going to really convert and the other story

00:08:07.080 I was going to just share was

00:08:08.900 they're speaking to a visitor

00:08:11.000 to the Inklings which was the literary group

00:08:13.500 they had at Oxford with Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Tolkien, Lewis, Hugo Dyson, later Tolkien's

00:08:19.020 son, and others. They have a visitor, and they're talking about the Spanish Civil War. And it's quite

00:08:24.800 controversial, of course, that Tolkien sided with Franco. We know that Orwell took the other side.

00:08:29.240 And he sided with Franco because of Catholicism, mainly. But Lewis is dressing down this visitor

00:08:35.600 who's siding with Franco. And Lewis is saying to him, oh, you know, we shouldn't be backing Franco,

00:08:40.720 blah blah but Tolkien's sitting there thinking it's not the fascism that Lewis hates it's actually

00:08:45.100 the Catholicism may or may not have been true but this was apparently Tolkien's feeling that's based

00:08:49.500 on the Inklings book by Carpenter whether that's definitely true or not that was certainly something

00:08:55.980 that is in that book so the point is it's a bit of a digression but there was always this tension

00:09:01.280 between the Anglicanism and the Catholicism yeah so don't believe anyone that tells you Lewis was

00:09:04.820 going to become a Catholic he wasn't going to become a Catholic and this remained a slight

00:09:08.100 point of tension. It wasn't catastrophic. The fallout between Lewis and Tolkien is, from what

00:09:13.560 I can gather, overstated. But this was one point of tension. Yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely. Because

00:09:19.500 obviously C.S. Lewis passed away a good decade before Tolkien. And of course, Tolkien was very

00:09:25.220 upset at Lewis's passing, of course. No, they remained basically lifelong friends. Well, they

00:09:30.480 were lifelong friends, except for the last sort of 10 years, they didn't really talk as much.

00:09:34.380 and after Lewis's marriage

00:09:36.920 it was a problem. Tolkien didn't approve of Lewis's

00:09:38.960 marriage to Joy Davidman

00:09:41.300 because it wasn't

00:09:42.780 she was a divorcee 0.98

00:09:44.860 and so for that

00:09:46.880 and many other reasons it cooled

00:09:48.800 and there was famously Tolkien didn't rate

00:09:50.860 Narnia because he felt it was a mixing

00:09:52.920 of mythologies or mythologies

00:09:54.720 as he pronounced it and so there

00:09:56.800 were many reasons where their friendship cooled towards

00:09:58.860 the end but as you say when he died

00:10:00.400 Tolkien was distraught and

00:10:02.640 felt the weight of their earlier friendship and how much it had meant to them.

00:10:06.840 There are other reasons they're sort of slightly cool.

00:10:08.940 One was Lewis formed a close friendship with Charles Williams,

00:10:12.620 who Tolkien liked as a person, but couldn't get along with his work.

00:10:16.960 So for various reasons, the relationship cooled towards the end.

00:10:20.540 But these books, yeah, they come from that original challenge,

00:10:24.400 which is so interesting, that challenge to write the kind of things they want,

00:10:28.320 which they would have called romances, which means an adventure story.

00:10:31.300 Yeah, like in the Arthurian sense of a romance, though they do often be literal romances as well.

00:10:38.840 And I think as well, it's wonderful that from that wellspring of that conversation, that challenge that was laid down by both the men,

00:10:47.220 that we see in the beginning of Out of the Silent Planet with Elwyn Ransom, Professor Elwyn Ransom.

00:10:56.180 And if that sounds like quite a strange name for a protagonist, spoiler alert, it's revealed at the end to be a cover name.

00:11:03.440 It's not his actual name, but it's because of the events of the story.

00:11:08.300 That's the cover name that an alias that he's given.

00:11:11.540 But nonetheless, he is a he just so happens to be a professor of philology.

00:11:17.340 I know from reading ahead a little bit

00:11:19.960 that in Perilandra, in the next novel,

00:11:22.920 that he's also revealed to have been a survivor of the Somme.

00:11:26.820 So he's very much, it's kind of like C.S. Lewis

00:11:30.220 just putting Tolkien in space.

00:11:32.800 Yeah, that's debated.

00:11:33.920 I mean, Tolkien in his own letters says

00:11:35.680 he's not that much based on me,

00:11:38.000 but you're right, of course, there's certain ways that he can...

00:11:40.780 Homages.

00:11:41.480 Yeah, yeah, clearly.

00:11:42.980 And of course, strong elements of Lewis, of course,

00:11:45.260 get into Ransom as well.

00:11:46.160 some of his beliefs. For example, he doesn't believe in vivisection. Lewis wrote an essay

00:11:49.840 against vivisection. Some wartime experiences that are alluded to in Perilandra, I get the

00:11:55.060 strong impression that Lewis's experiences. So yeah, it's a mixture. I mean, and in terms of the

00:12:00.940 name, Tolkien writes to Stanley Unwin, his publisher, that actually Ransom was going to

00:12:06.940 be called Unwin, but he just, Lewis changed it. And the song said, I don't think the name is

00:12:10.620 particularly that important. The name becomes important later in the trilogy and Lewis finds

00:12:15.640 meaning for it, but originally I think he just needed a name. And yeah, he made him a philologist,

00:12:19.640 which is the philology part is key. It's basically an old name for being a linguist, pretty much.

00:12:24.600 That's key because he has to communicate with the aliens. But again, I don't want to get ahead

00:12:28.280 of ourselves, but that's a key thing. Absolutely. No, it reminds me,

00:12:32.440 it reminded me a lot of how in M.R. James' ghost stories, all of the protagonists in those

00:12:39.720 antiquarians it's like you just you you you put in the protagonist who has like a particular 0.94

00:12:45.240 penchant skill skill set that's going to allow them to to flourish yeah in the environment that

00:12:52.220 you're going to set them in like this wouldn't have worked quite as well if uh you know a brick

00:12:57.920 layer had been taken to space for example not that there's anything wrong with brick layers you know

00:13:03.420 but like you get my point yeah it's um it just allows for that and one thing that's immediately

00:13:08.400 interesting as well i mean i love the um one thing as well just to say i i really love there's such

00:13:15.680 an understated beauty to lewis's writing style it's not overtly flowery it's probably closer to

00:13:24.080 to george orwell's in that respect but it is really really beautiful and he has such a

00:13:30.220 a wonderful just as an example so um uh ransom is out in england uh on a short walking holiday

00:13:39.200 and he talks about the fact that um there's like uh natalie and sterk and all these little places

00:13:45.360 that he's just uh walking through um far off the grid uh which is perfect because the faculty

00:13:51.080 you know won't notice him being gone when he's abducted and taken to space um but we get this

00:13:57.460 wonderful little sentence where he talks about the fact that he's supposed to be getting a room

00:14:01.120 for tonight and he says about being refused a bed it says the place had changed hands since he last

00:14:06.680 went for a walking tour in these parts the kindly old landlord on whom he had reckoned had been

00:14:12.100 replaced by someone whom the barmaid referred to as the lady and the lady was apparently a 1.00

00:14:19.000 british innkeeper of that orthodox school who regard guests as a nuisance you know and so

00:14:25.040 immediately in with all these little quirks of the English character and even though they are

00:14:30.260 um you know he's saying that this is a particular type of character you can tell there is an

00:14:34.760 endearingness behind it it's it's a homely character I love that because of course I grew

00:14:39.600 up in a essentially a bed and breakfast little hotel and restaurant in the in the lakes I imagine

00:14:44.140 there's a lot of those yeah yeah yeah there's a lot of that actually we don't really love off

00:14:48.020 comers but yeah perfect observation a lot of people have said to me a lot a lot's going too

00:14:52.220 far many people but some have said to me they love this intro and i find it brilliant as well

00:14:57.320 it's quite hard to say why he's out there on a walking tour he's like oh i've got to walk too

00:15:00.940 far and and he ends up meeting uh we don't give the whole i don't know how many spoilers you give

00:15:04.600 on this show but but basically ends up uh he ends up offering to do a favor for a local woman yeah

00:15:09.760 of helping her son who's a bit sort of a challenged get home and so that ends up gets him into all

00:15:16.240 sorts of trouble yeah but but um the opening for some reason just out there walking is so

00:15:21.940 it's so striking and i found that as well i don't know why but it's just a great writer as you say

00:15:26.640 and i think he's i felt it was unobtrusive writing he's a great storyteller but not

00:15:31.420 not a sort of foregrounded style you know how you might read a comic novelist someone like

00:15:35.140 joseph heller or or whoever i mean you may read um i'm thinking of thomas bernard but no one knows

00:15:40.420 who that is but there are certain writers who have a very uh clear and foregrounded style

00:15:45.360 where you sort of the style is a big part of it particularly comic novelists because of course

00:15:49.040 it has to be funny of course so the prose itself and the sentences are important lewis i didn't

00:15:52.660 feel that i felt it was more unobtrusive storytelling but reading it a second time

00:15:55.820 i am struck by how good the writing is and i've also just read all of narnia and the writing is

00:16:00.760 so good and there's wry humor and i don't think you should underestimate lewis he famously

00:16:04.960 not famously, he said to a child who was asking him how to write,

00:16:10.660 one of the things he said was, listen back to it, read it out loud,

00:16:13.860 and if it doesn't sound right, don't use that sentence.

00:16:16.140 Oh, yes, I remember seeing this guidance that he wrote, yes.

00:16:18.440 So he's very big on how the sentence sounds,

00:16:21.060 so the care that has gone into his writing.

00:16:22.760 Although he was a prolific writer, the sentences are just great.

00:16:26.240 Yes, he had a very good sense of quality control on all of his work.

00:16:31.540 That said, Tolkien does accuse him in this book.

00:16:33.340 he says some passages are a bit sort of lead

00:16:36.240 and I think he says that he spoke to Lewis about that

00:16:38.560 and that he kind of revised them

00:16:39.860 because Tolkien was an absolute stickler of course for everything

00:16:43.240 Yeah, he was a man of very particular tastes

00:16:47.040 of very particular tastes

00:16:49.120 But I think this is compelling

00:16:50.100 I mean, speaking of Tolkien

00:16:51.000 he said he couldn't put this down when he read it in manuscript

00:16:53.480 Yes

00:16:54.020 Because he was writing to Stanley Unwin, Tolkien's publisher

00:16:56.800 saying, you know, Unwin sent out of the Silent Planet manuscript to a reader

00:17:01.320 the reader said it was not that good he said lewis may write a good novel one day but this

00:17:05.820 isn't it he described the characters as bunk and tolkien said well if you're capable of using the

00:17:10.200 word bunk you're probably not the kind of person that will like this book so he didn't think much

00:17:15.020 of the reader right and that is mad and it actually got rejected by unwin so think about that a world

00:17:19.680 where a c.s lewis book gets rejected it's absurd but it later got published but that did delay the

00:17:25.760 publishing but yeah i i found it the first time i read it i read it in like almost all in an evening

00:17:30.700 a little bit the next day, I find it extremely compelling, as did Tolkien.

00:17:34.120 Yeah, and I think as well that it's actually the perfect place

00:17:37.580 to start off the novel just in the rural English countryside

00:17:41.160 because it immediately positions, particularly for a British audience,

00:17:45.060 it immediately just catches you in something absolutely familiar.

00:17:49.580 Everyone, unless you're some weird Londoner who never leaves,

00:17:54.040 basically everyone has a point of reference to the English countryside.

00:17:57.500 Everyone's been there at some point on a holiday themselves

00:18:00.320 or the parents took them when they were kids.

00:18:02.640 You've seen it.

00:18:03.620 You know it's out there.

00:18:04.840 And so you immediately bring in the most familiar

00:18:08.280 kind of consensus setting, ready to take the protagonist

00:18:12.120 out to the absolute unknown and the deeply unfamiliar.

00:18:16.740 That is a great point.

00:18:18.060 And just on the biographical side,

00:18:20.200 Lewis used to love these walking tours with his brother, Warnie,

00:18:23.320 and they would walk at pace, huge distances,

00:18:26.300 because men were men back then.

00:18:27.520 They were.

00:18:27.860 Whereas if they walked with Tolkien,

00:18:29.540 he would always stop and name every tree an insect

00:18:32.000 and he became a pain because they wanted to

00:18:33.880 bomb on and he wanted to start and say like

00:18:35.420 don't bring Tolkien again because this is a

00:18:37.860 funny detail but on the familiarity

00:18:39.960 of the setting he even

00:18:41.880 goes as far in that hideous strength of

00:18:43.840 pointing out in the preface

00:18:45.380 that I've set this in a recognisable

00:18:47.940 world, a world I know which is the

00:18:49.820 university, he says the reason I've set it in university

00:18:51.800 that's the only world I know but he says

00:18:53.640 because it's a modern fairy tale

00:18:55.280 and he says that in those fairy tales of the

00:18:57.900 past when you came across uh petty kings and woodcuts and so on that was is fantastical to

00:19:04.020 them that was normal and then you went beyond into the strange world but that was normal to them so

00:19:08.620 he sets it in normality now but it's very much like this here he started off as you say in the

00:19:12.940 most normal and recognizable setting before getting to a very alien in all senses of the word yeah

00:19:17.480 right exactly so um as exactly as you said this uh this local woman um asks him to basically get

00:19:26.180 Her son's not home on time, and so he asks if Ransom will go and help get her son back for her.

00:19:33.220 And in doing this, he basically just forces himself through a hedge of this house called The Rise.

00:19:40.600 And in there, he finds, well, he's caught by the people who are about at the house,

00:19:47.000 and these prove to be a chap called Devine and another chap called Weston.

00:19:52.200 um and that i actually what you're saying i thought they were great great characters i

00:19:58.800 thought they were actually perfectly serviceable for um i mean i don't know where they go in

00:20:03.500 obviously the next two novels but like for the purposes of this one alone i felt like they were

00:20:08.440 really good characters in just carrying up conveying the themes and the the sense of

00:20:13.460 self-interest that on all of the the aspects of human nature that c.s lewis is basically trying to

00:20:19.780 to guard against and you immediately know that they're bad people because um ransom talks about

00:20:26.720 the fact that uh one of them devine uh that he knew him from his school days and he immediately

00:20:31.400 says yes now i distinctly remember him being the worst person at school like just the worst and so

00:20:37.540 you immediately know it's like and again we all know the worst person at school and that they

00:20:42.620 always remain the worst and so yeah there's a lot of clues yeah they're two great characters as you 0.92

00:20:49.380 say devine a sort of loose opportunistic just scumbag basically yeah he's greedy he's only 0.99

00:20:56.500 interested in power and money just complete scum all the way down superficial charm you know and 0.99

00:21:02.040 it's sort of that posh superficial charm but he's a total wrong and western a fascinating character 0.95

00:21:06.720 because he's not wholly a wrong and he's someone who has a very strong belief in what he's doing

00:21:12.860 he's a great scientist there's a moral crusade yes and he believes very much in the hg wells

00:21:17.420 I think he believes in the progress, science, and he has disdain for anyone who stands in his way.

00:21:23.300 Any means is worth it to get to his end. And he justifies this by saying, I'm a great scientist,

00:21:28.100 you don't understand. But because ultimately he believes that he's doing good, that's what

00:21:33.480 separates him from Devine, even though it's, we clearly learn in the narrative, it's wrongheaded

00:21:38.240 according to Lewis, certainly. He's not a hero like Ransom, who is a moral hero, but he's not

00:21:44.480 as bad as Devine, essentially. Yes. Just a great little passage here. It says,

00:21:50.480 Oh, I'm Devine. Don't you remember me? Of course, I should think I do, said Ransom as the two men

00:21:56.080 shook hands with the rather laborious cordiality which is traditional in such meetings. In actual

00:22:02.000 fact, Ransom had disliked Devine at school as much as anyone he could remember. Touching, isn't it?

00:22:07.740 Said Devine. The far-flung line, even in the wilds of Stirk and Nadabee. This is where we get a lump

00:22:13.700 in our throats and remembers Sunday Evening Chapel and the DOP. You don't know Weston, perhaps?

00:22:19.540 Devine indicated his massive and loud-voiced companion. The Weston, he added. You know,

00:22:25.660 the great physicist. Has Einstein on toast and drinks a pint of Schrodinger's blood for breakfast.

00:22:31.920 Weston, allow me to introduce my old schoolfellow, Ransom. Dr. Elwyn Ransom. The Ransom, you know,

00:22:38.800 the great philologist, has Jesperson on toast and drinks a pint of, and then Weston's just like,

00:22:44.600 I know nothing about it, and if you expect me to say that I'm pleased to see this person who

00:22:49.780 was just broken into my garden, you will be disappointed. I don't care a tuppence what

00:22:54.440 school he was at or what unscientific foolery. He is at present wasting money that ought to go

00:23:00.520 to research. I want to know what he's doing here, and after that, I want to see the last of him.

00:23:06.580 So that's the other thing as well.

00:23:07.820 It's the fact that Weston has absolutely no respect

00:23:10.960 for Ransom's field, of his professional field as well.

00:23:16.380 Yes. Was that page nine, by the way?

00:23:17.780 Are we on the same page?

00:23:18.300 It was, yeah. We are literally on the same page.

00:23:21.660 Good. Yeah.

00:23:23.680 What's fascinating about Weston, you touched on it there.

00:23:26.780 He doesn't have any time at all for what Ransom's up to.

00:23:30.360 He doesn't care.

00:23:31.940 And this comes across, there's a great part,

00:23:33.380 this is page 28 and 29,

00:23:34.520 where you get the differences in their philosophy.

00:23:37.860 So Ransom says that he disagrees with vivisection even,

00:23:43.080 which is something Lewis wrote a whole essay on,

00:23:44.860 as I said before.

00:23:45.880 So let me just find this quote.

00:23:46.920 He said, so Weston says,

00:23:48.780 you cannot be so small-minded as to think that the rights

00:23:50.920 or the life of an individual or of a million individuals

00:23:53.300 are of the slightest importance in comparison with this,

00:23:55.940 meaning this mission.

00:23:57.360 Ransom says, I happen to disagree, said Ransom.

00:23:59.600 I always have disagreed even about vivisection.

00:24:01.900 and so we see the difference there but even more in this passage here when uh western's saying to

00:24:09.120 him have i got ahead of the pot here should i back up so not so this is an overall note about about

00:24:13.740 western's talking about the mission and why they need to go to space and so on and why his

00:24:18.360 scientific mission should trump all ransom replies well you hold all the cards and i must make the

00:24:23.780 best of it i consider your philosophy of life raving lunacy i suppose all that stuff about

00:24:27.800 infinity and eternity means you think you're justified in doing anything absolutely anything

00:24:32.380 here and now on the off chance that some creatures or other descended from man as we know him may

00:24:37.160 crawl about a few centuries longer in some part of the universe and western just replies yes

00:24:41.740 anything whatever return the scientist sternly an all-educated opinion for i do not call classics

00:24:47.620 and history and such trash education is entirely on my side i'm glad you raised the point and i

00:24:52.980 advise you to remember my answer. It's very, very clear, the difference between them. And for

00:24:59.240 Weston, any means are justified to get to his end. And Ransom is completely different. So it's

00:25:05.880 really the difference between principalism and utilitarianism. And I'll just give you another

00:25:11.440 passage. This shows a difference between Devine and Weston, but also between Ransom. And these

00:25:16.040 are just overall thematic differences before we go too much into the plot. But there's a part where

00:25:20.600 Devine is speaking to Weston and we can't

00:25:22.720 hear Weston, so we only hear Devine's

00:25:24.540 answers. And he says, Devine

00:25:26.480 says, quiet, quiet. He said, it is

00:25:28.540 understood that you are doing it all from the highest

00:25:30.480 motives. As long as they lead to the same actions

00:25:32.500 as my motives, you're quite welcome to them.

00:25:34.940 So, this is brilliant

00:25:36.600 because Lewis is wryly pointing out

00:25:38.700 that evil is

00:25:40.540 evil, however you dress it up, whatever rhetoric

00:25:42.640 you use, and you're ending up in the same

00:25:44.580 place. So it doesn't matter about Weston's

00:25:46.480 big ideas about it. Whereas Ransom would not

00:25:48.580 do things in principle

00:25:50.580 i'll give you an example there's this classic um 10 men in a lifeboat uh scenario where it's

00:25:57.600 you can eat one man and kill him and eat him and nine will survive do you do it and if you believe

00:26:04.760 in principalism you go of course not we want we'll have 10 dead heroes rather than nine live 0.93

00:26:10.000 cannibals survive but if you believe in a sort of consequentialist utilitarian philosophy you say

00:26:15.420 well of course and i thought about that in light of these characters yeah ransom would never do it

00:26:19.820 Devine would say, what's for dessert?

00:26:22.060 Like, doesn't care at all.

00:26:23.580 Weston would say, yes, unfortunately,

00:26:26.060 we need to make the sacrifice for my great mission.

00:26:28.620 And it's unfortunate it has to be this person.

00:26:30.140 Weston would say, God, I'm full.

00:26:31.900 You know, it'd be like...

00:26:33.020 He'd say, I'm sure you'll understand, old chap,

00:26:34.460 but this has to be done for my research.

00:26:36.300 And so that's his philosophy.

00:26:38.140 It's all worth it for his great scientific mission.

00:26:40.460 And that's what Manson pushes back against

00:26:42.540 throughout the book.

00:26:43.580 He says, I don't even believe in vivisection.

00:26:45.180 So no, I don't believe in your world at all,

00:26:47.580 in your worldview.

00:26:48.540 And everything you're saying about Weston is even more just put on display for the reader,

00:26:53.260 because of course from this tiny little house in rural England, Ransom is very quickly drugged

00:27:00.700 by the two men and wakes up on board the spaceship.

00:27:04.060 If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters,

00:27:07.420 head to our website where you can find more.

00:27:18.540 Thank you.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - April 04, 2026

PREVIEW： Chronicles #41 ｜ Out Of The Silent Planet with Nick Dixon

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