Fun article! Interesting titles. Of the post-Radium-Age list, I'd like to point out C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength for special attention, just because ever

Fun article! Interesting titles. Of the post-Radium-Age list, I'd like to point out C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength for special attention, just because everyone and their dog has some experience with Narnia and usually has some preconceptions of what Lewis is all about based on those -- but this story is likely to defy those expectations. If you'd like to turn your one-dimensional stereotype of the man into something more nuanced, this book is the ticket. Also, a good portion of it (indeed, the central plot-bearing part) is of Extremely High Quality (as endorsed by George Orwell... albeit with certain qualifications for the rest of the book). This portion reads sort of like a spiritual prequel to 1984 (a work that would come 4 years later). It's also surprising to many people to find Lewis writing, even incidentally, about eroticism, and that's quite besides the chain-smoking butch-lesbian chief-of-police (rumored to be a sort of character Lewis slightly fancied, if I recall correctly). Third in a trilogy of space stories (which few are aware Lewis wrote) this novel just barely predates nuclear weapons - so Space is still a positive thing instead of being a place of vacuum and death filled with the missiles of global thermonuclear annihilation. Also, if you've heard about how fascinated the author was with Relativity and time moving at different speeds in different places (e.g. in Narnia) you may have wondered why Lewis never did a time travel novel. Turns out, he started one, and its rough draft eventually turned into this. My advice: read the short and sweet Out of the Silent Planet first for context, skip Perelandra (dangerously overdosed with overt Christian allegory), and then try this thing.