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The Scientists Take Over: George Orwell Reviews “That Hideous Strength” (1945)
- frabbit 6y agoI have always loved the idea that the same person that wrote the Narnia stories created a dystopian neo-Arthurian fantasy involving mad scientists, lesbian Nazi police chiefs torturing Christians and interplanetary travel. There is a very good late-80s BBC Radio 4 dramatization.
- pfdietz 6y agoAnd then he got married, and the Great Vivisectionist gave the love of his life terminal bone cancer and she died in agony. Pain is a problem indeed.
- robertlagrant 6y agoIf a guy who was simultaneous chair at Oxford and Cambridge can work through it, it's probably doable.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoI always liked this review because it reads like a diff between _That Hideous Strength_ and _1984_ (not yet written). I like the book itself as a sort of spiritual prequel. If 1984 is the dystopia realized, THS is the dystopia as it is born. It's an interesting work. It's flawed, as Orwell notes, but it stands at the crossroads between the prewar and postwar worlds, at the very beginning, perhaps, of what we would recognize as Modernity. To the best of my knowledge, it is the last work of pre-atomic sci-fi. The work itself is as transitional as the time period. In more concrete terms, it provides a frame on the notion of Progress, and how easily Progress (and those in charge of calling their work Progress) can turn a blind eye to the merits of what is being replaced, with contemptuous disdain for those it leaves behind. (Today we may be more likely to call this sort of thing "Disruption," and while there are real differences in the dynamic, there are similarities too.) Finally, there's just one small piece of very good advice I extracted from an incidental note in the first chapter — if you write a letter to a committee of some sort, complaining, it will be much stronger and go over better if you limit yourself to a single complaint.
- rossdavidh 6y ago"However, by the standard of the novels appearing nowadays this is a book worth reading." Ouch.
- dash2 6y agoEnglish postwar fiction maybe not so good. What do we now read from the 40s or 50s? Hard to think of anything. Kingsley Amis? Late Evelyn Waugh?
- pnin 6y agoHenry Green, Graham Greene, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Anthony Powell. But the review is from just a week after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, so Orwell is referring to wartime fiction rather than postwar fiction.
- dash2 6y agoI've heard of Greene and Powell. That might be just me, of course....
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- medium_burrito 6y agoThat's true- you had to wait for prime Alfred Bester for a few years still.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoI was sorely disappointed by Lewis's Space Trilogy. The entire trilogy could be summed up as follows: "And God smote his enemies." Three books building up to a final conflict, and in the end it feels like one side wasn't even needed, since God takes care of it anyway. To boot, his use of allegory on Perelandra was just hideous. If you're going to make an allegory, you don't have a character explain the allegory while it's in progress!
- fennecfoxen 6y agoThis is precisely Orwell's objection to the end of _That Hideous Strength_, in the review which is linked. (On the other hand, if that's literally all you took away from reading it, then you missed all of the parts which Orwell found engaging and which he ran with in _1984_.)
- BadThink6655321 6y agoIt’s the same complaint made against the ending of Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galáctica. All this has happened before and all this will happen again.
- brobdingnagians 6y agoEven though both you and Orwell dislike that aspect. I think it is crucial to the books. There are many other good books without that aspect, including 1984. But a key part of the book is the hopefullness in asserting that it is not only by our own strength or insight can the evil things we see around us be overcome. A major point of the book is that evil does exist, conspiracies exist, but that good will triumph because there is something special about good. 1984 ends in a very different tone, both make good points. The variety is good.
- a1369209993 6y ago> Even though both you and Orwell dislike that aspect. I think it is crucial to the books. > asserting that it is not only by our own strength or insight [but by the intervention of a purportedly-benevolent supernatural being that totally isn't (barely-trying-to-be-)secrect-ly evil, we promise!] can the evil things we see around us be overcome. The fact that it's a blatantly obvious lie is precisely why that aspect is bad. And the fact that it's crucial to the books is precisely the problem.
- steve_g 6y agoI've always liked this novel for its depiction of people whose justification for tyranny is "improving society", regardless of how the members of society feel about being improved.
- djsumdog 6y agoAll orders of atrocities can be justified when people see humanity as a problem to be fixed.
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- zabzonk 6y agoI've always quite liked this book, but the thing that really wrecks it for me is that the people on the side of evil are so chaotic they would not be able to organise a piss-up in a brewery, much less take over the world. In the real world, N.I.C.E. would rather be something like Google or Amazon.
- robertlagrant 6y agoWelcome to Don't Be Evil :)
- brobdingnagians 6y agoI love the trilogy. Some other similar things by CS Lewis that relate are the short speech "The Inner Circle" and "The Abolition of Man". The abolition of man in particular points out the difference between the aims of classical education and modern propogandism-- and how education should create free thinking independent individuals, rather than trying to shape them to our own views or create good worker drones.
- steve_g 6y agoThe Inner Ring - I think it's my favorite piece by Lewis. https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/
- robertlagrant 6y agoSame. I reread it at least once a year.
- brobdingnagians 6y ago> Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable. I love this statement. It seems quite obvious to me, as it did to him, that out of a planet of billions of people, some of those would be power hungry and organize themselves together for better carrying out their schemes. The rest of us should be vigilant in preventing them from rising in power, since they usually have little empathy for the rest of us.
- notankies 6y agoIt's dangerous to think of people in terms of "the rest of us" and some other group out there plotting evil, against which one must be vigilant, for it is the case that the evil is in all of us, and if you spend too much time "being vigilant" against perceived evil men, you may overlook the wickedness of your own soul. "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
- shireboy 6y agoA great quote I've carried with me a while. Still, I'd have to think even Solzhenitsyn would recommend we not let the Gulags rise again if we can help it. His description of the laws and culture that led to the Gulags are eye opening.
- mrob 6y agoSee also Haldane's review, which is IMO more interesting. It's longer, contains plot spoilers, and Haldane has more fundamental disagreements with Lewis than Orwell does: http://lewisiana.nl/haldane/ http://lewisiana.nl/haldane/ I find all of Lewis's works somewhat frustrating to read because I think such an obviously skilled writer should have been able to do better. Both Orwell's complaint (willingness to compromise the story for ideological ends) and Haldane's (attacks on a straw-man version of science as a result of ignorance of the real thing) are IMO correct. That said, Lewis's prose is top-notch and many of the individual scenes are great. That Hideous Strength is the best of the Space Trilogy because by that point Lewis has mostly dropped the pretense that he's writing scifi. The first two feel derivative of better scifi writers (Lewis acknowledges H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, and I suspect David Lindsay is also an influence), whereas the last is closer to his Narnia series (although aimed at an older audience).
- pmoriarty 6y agoTo call Lewis worse than Stapledon and Lindsay is saying quite a lot, as I find both nearly unreadable. Stapledon at least had enormous ambition and unprecedented scope, though his writing reads like a poorly written encyclopedia. I have nothing good to say about Lindsay. Wells was great, though.. both readable and imaginative. I hesitate to mention him and Lewis in the same breath, as I find absolutely nothing redeeming about Lewis' writing either, unless you like your conservative Christian propaganda laid on extra thick.
- mrob 6y agoI mean as a scifi writer, not a writer in general.
- brudgers 6y agoa straw-man version of science as a result of ignorance of the real thing This is a no-true-Scotsman and there has been substantial scholarship of this practice as part of scientific endeavor at least since Khun’s Structure of Scientific Revolution. As Orwell notes, science had just obliterated 300,000 people quick as a flash...and so it goes. Musk tweeting a topless wired monkey head, Bezos scaling mechanical Turks, and Thiel openly seeking immortality. Silicon Valley funding transfusion of young people’s blood into the old, Crispr edited babies, and even the Tuskegee Experiment back in Lewis’s day. Science is a human endeavor with all the vileness (and magnificence) that entails.
- pmoriarty 6y agoWhat I remember of That Hideous Strength was Lewis caricaturing his ideological opponents while idealizing his allies. If you don't already agree with his conservative, Christian point of view, it can make for frustrating reading. Apart from this, nothing notable springs to mind about this book. There are far, far better ways to spend your reading hours.
- pessimizer 6y agoMy favorite part in a lot of ideological works is when the author clearly figures out that his hero is the bad guy by any objective standard, and is about to do a horrific thing to the antagonist. That's the moment when, suddenly, 1) the antagonist molests a child or rapes a woman, and is killed with glee, or 2) the hero gets the upper hand on the antagonist but decides morally and bravely not to kill them, then turns their back on the antagonist for no reason; the ungrateful antagonist immediately takes the opportunity to dishonorably kill the hero from behind, but is killed by a sidekick, secondary character, or act of God in the nick of time, leaving the hero pure.
- memling 6y ago> That's the moment when, suddenly, 1) the antagonist molests a child or rapes a woman, and is killed with glee, or 2) the hero gets the upper hand on the antagonist but decides morally and bravely not to kill them, then turns their back on the antagonist for no reason; the ungrateful antagonist immediately takes the opportunity to dishonorably kill the hero from behind, but is killed by a sidekick, secondary character, or act of God in the nick of time, leaving the hero pure. Could start that way. I think it's Thomas Covenant that works like this? An interesting contrast to the point, perhaps.
- smitty1e 6y agoTo those criticizing Lewis' ideological context as flawed: please suggest a superior alternative existential context for comparison.
- robertlagrant 6y agoIt's only proselytising if it's Christian. All other worldviews get a free pass :)
- Brian_K_White 6y agoAnyone capable of believing in fairy tales, is obviously just as capable of believing this. :)
- smitty1e 6y agoSome tales seem treated more fairy than others. :)
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- hcrisp 6y agoThat Hideous Strength is, to me, the most challenging of his space trilogy. I liked Perelandra best, but only after reading it a second time when a friend pointed out that it was a reimagining of the garden of Eden (I was too young to pick up on that during the first read). Out of the Silent Planet is interesting since the reference is to Earth and how it remains "silent" to those outside of it who choose to avoid its rampant evil. Incidentally the trilogy came about when C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien agreed to write separate sci-fi series - Lewis would write a space trilogy and Tolkien a time-travel one [0]. Tolkien was to write of a traveler from England who visited Numenor (the land of Aragorn's sires) before it drowned in a fate similar to Atlantis. Lewis completed his, but Tolkien did not although much of the material was published in a volume on the history of Middle Earth by his son, Christopher. (Lewis referred to his friend as "that great but dilatory and unmethodical man".) Tolkien's experiment did result in the development of the idea of the Fall of Numenor which did get incorporated into the Lord of the Rings saga. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Road_and_Other_Writings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Road_and_Other_Writ...
- jecel 6y agoThe time travel hook at the end of "Out of the Silent Planet" actually was to be about travel to parallel timelines and not to the past or future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_(Lewis_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_(Lewis_novel) This unfinished book was dropped in favor of "Perelandra", which I think was a good choice. Numenor was briefly mentioned in "That Hideous Strength". In Brazil the first two books were translated to Portuguese but, as far as I know, "Strength" never was. That was probably also a good choice as the more familiar you are with British culture the easier it is to like that book. Even for me it is my least favorite and given that I had a computer project named "Merlin" when I read it I expected to enjoy it more.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid. Lewis would have rejected the sentiment of that last sentence. For him, all of human history is part of the drama of God vs the devil. And although there has been supernatural at points in the struggle, still what humans did still mattered. For him, a large part of the struggle is humans surrendering themselves to be used as the vessel for God’s plan. In some sense, Merlin is a type of Mary who opens himself up to be the human body that the supernatural will inhabit, even though he knows it can ultimately destroy his body. As an aside, this is one of my favorite books, and I would love to see it made into a movie.
- robertlagrant 6y agoThe quoted sentence is - I think - a fairly modern perspective, replacing the previous "god vs devil, with humans in the middle". You see it all the time in media - there are demons to fight, and humans fight them. Buffy, Supernatural, etc etc. The "we are god" trope is fascinatingly watchable.
- adrianmonk 6y agoIt has been a while since I've read it, but the theme of the whole trilogy is human moral corruption, which of course for CS Lewis has a spiritual basis. So I have to disagree with Orwell that the supernatural is superfluous. It's more that (each book focusing on a different planet), science is the vehicle for human moral corruption to play out on Earth. Orwell obviously didn't find anything worthwhile in that, but I think it's more of a matter of Orwell not finding the theme compelling rather than a problem with how the book is put together.
- sudosteph 6y agoI've read it pretty recently, but my understanding was that the whole trilogy was just a more approachable version of "Abolition of Man". I could see someone like Orwell agreeing with the problem statement in that book (moral relativity is bad) but disagreeing with the way it plays out in the novel.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoTHS, specifically, seems to me less about moral relativity and more about coming face to face with a naked Will to Power.
- Stierlitz 6y ago> In general outline, and to some extent in atmosphere, it rather resembles G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.”: “In his efforts to thwart the council, Syme eventually discovers that five of the other six members are also undercover detectives; each was employed just as mysteriously and assigned to defeat the Council. They soon find out they were fighting each other and not real anarchists; such was the mastermind plan of their president” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1695/1695-h/1695-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1695/1695-h/1695-h.htm Sounds like what the war-on-terror eventually ended-up like in Northern Ireland. Eventually virtually every other terrorist of note ended up working for the security forces.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoI would be interested in any background you have on this. (I know Steaknife was the worst example of this, but am interested how far it went - and as a fairly obvious corollary - what would happen if instead of "turning" terrorists they were just arrested as normal criminals mostly are. If there are lessons on the war on drugs for example.
- Stierlitz 6y agoNothing that's not already out in the media. Colin Wallace (and others) wrote about this, so they framed him for manslaughter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wallace#Imprisonment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wallace#Imprisonment
- fennecfoxen 6y agoThis is not actually the part of _Thursday_ that Orwell meant by his statement. He is referring to the overall structure in which paranoia and espionage give way to an allegorical / supernatural end (which occurs after everyone heads off to chase after Sunday himself).
- quietlurker 6y agoReplace The Head with "AI" and I think Lewis wrote a fantastic cautionary tale. In essence, check your sources, consider your ends. Science is a technique performed by humans to achieve some end. Humans use machines to run mechanical routines called AI to perform tasks in the world. What are the sources of our results? What are the ends of our chosen uses and efforts?
- ckemere 6y agoI really like the last line: "However, by the standard of the novels appearing nowadays this is a book worth reading."
- adultSwim 6y agoI recommend reading Orwell's review of Mein Kampf https://carnegiecouncil-media.storage.googleapis.com/files/v18_i007-008_a010.pdf https://carnegiecouncil-media.storage.googleapis.com/files/v...