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See also Haldane's review, which is IMO more interesting. It's longer, contains plot spoilers, and Haldane has more fundamental disagreements with Lewis than Or

by mrob 6y ago

See 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 ago
To 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 ago
  I mean as a scifi writer, not a writer in general.
brudgers 6y ago
a 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 ago
  Science is just a tool. It's humans who choose to use it for good or ill.
  - Amezarak 6y ago
    Tools do not exist as tools in a world without wielders. A tool is only a tool while someone is using it. “Science” does not exist as such outside its employment by human beings, it is not some Ideal floating in conceptual space. There is no science except insofar as human beings are using it for ends that human beings judge good or ill. So it’s entirely reasonable to consider whether “science” - which I think here is really standing in for a certain kind of technological mindset - weighed in the balance, would be found wanting, whether there is not a better way of approaching the world and the things in it, including ourselves, rather than considering everything in it a sort of Heideggerian standing reserve. This seems particularly true as we advance rather thoughtlessly toward the development of things like AI and genetic engineering.
  - brudgers 6y ago
    just a tool That pretty much misses the character of human experience as humans experience it. There’s no mereness of tools in the fabric of our psychological existence. In particular abstractions on the scale of science in our conscious processes. The “just” is how we rationalize removing half a chimp skull to sell electric cars. It’s how we excuse the inexcusable as ordinary.
    - Brian_K_White 6y ago
      I think it is you who missed a point, and don't have a sensible definition of "just" in "just a tool". It's "just" a tool because it is not good or bad by itself, and does not even favor good or bad employment. If you have a problem with a bad use of science, then you have a problem with a bad user of science. By contrast, it's not like saying some deadly poison is "just a chemical" that might possibly have one or two possibly good uses but is otherwise entirely a bad thing that we could all live without if it were erased from the world. Science is nothing but codified rationality. There is no possible way to twist irrationality into being prefferable to rationality. And so there is no slightest trace of a valid argument that science is a problem that should be disfavored. Yes it is in fact "just" a tool. The human experience doesn't change this at all. You don't need science to rationalize removing the top half of a chimpanzee skull. People who will do a thing, will do a thing with any tool. Science, religion, politics, "think of the children", plain might, anything.
jimbokun 6y ago
It’s been a few years since I read the book. But in my recollection, the NICE organization exercises a lot of their influence through carefully placed and worded articles and editorials in newspapers and magazines. They are manipulating public perception to extend their power. Which makes me think of “fake news” and intelligence agencies running influence campaigns through social media. Lewis’ villains I think are less meant to be “true scientists” than experts in politics and disinformation campaigns.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  NICE manipulates true scientists, though I recall a NICE director bemoans their concentration of linguists and lack of philologists, another compliment to Tolkien. The propaganda portrayal was disturbing. NICE is shown writing populist dreck for the equivalent of the Mail, and at the same time, publishing densely worded scholarly essays, to achieve the same manipulation in different groups of people. It is remarked on that the readers of the intelligent publications are further manipulated into liking the material aimed at them by the existence of the populist material, as they are eager to demonstrate their intellectual superiority by reading credulously publications they seem superior.

by mrob 6y ago

pmoriarty 6y ago

To 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 ago
I mean as a scifi writer, not a writer in general.

brudgers 6y ago

a 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 ago
Science is just a tool. It's humans who choose to use it for good or ill.
- Amezarak 6y ago
  Tools do not exist as tools in a world without wielders. A tool is only a tool while someone is using it. “Science” does not exist as such outside its employment by human beings, it is not some Ideal floating in conceptual space. There is no science except insofar as human beings are using it for ends that human beings judge good or ill. So it’s entirely reasonable to consider whether “science” - which I think here is really standing in for a certain kind of technological mindset - weighed in the balance, would be found wanting, whether there is not a better way of approaching the world and the things in it, including ourselves, rather than considering everything in it a sort of Heideggerian standing reserve. This seems particularly true as we advance rather thoughtlessly toward the development of things like AI and genetic engineering.
- brudgers 6y ago
  just a tool That pretty much misses the character of human experience as humans experience it. There’s no mereness of tools in the fabric of our psychological existence. In particular abstractions on the scale of science in our conscious processes. The “just” is how we rationalize removing half a chimp skull to sell electric cars. It’s how we excuse the inexcusable as ordinary.
  - Brian_K_White 6y ago
    I think it is you who missed a point, and don't have a sensible definition of "just" in "just a tool". It's "just" a tool because it is not good or bad by itself, and does not even favor good or bad employment. If you have a problem with a bad use of science, then you have a problem with a bad user of science. By contrast, it's not like saying some deadly poison is "just a chemical" that might possibly have one or two possibly good uses but is otherwise entirely a bad thing that we could all live without if it were erased from the world. Science is nothing but codified rationality. There is no possible way to twist irrationality into being prefferable to rationality. And so there is no slightest trace of a valid argument that science is a problem that should be disfavored. Yes it is in fact "just" a tool. The human experience doesn't change this at all. You don't need science to rationalize removing the top half of a chimpanzee skull. People who will do a thing, will do a thing with any tool. Science, religion, politics, "think of the children", plain might, anything.

jimbokun 6y ago

It’s been a few years since I read the book. But in my recollection, the NICE organization exercises a lot of their influence through carefully placed and worded articles and editorials in newspapers and magazines. They are manipulating public perception to extend their power. Which makes me think of “fake news” and intelligence agencies running influence campaigns through social media. Lewis’ villains I think are less meant to be “true scientists” than experts in politics and disinformation campaigns.

1123581321 6y ago
NICE manipulates true scientists, though I recall a NICE director bemoans their concentration of linguists and lack of philologists, another compliment to Tolkien. The propaganda portrayal was disturbing. NICE is shown writing populist dreck for the equivalent of the Mail, and at the same time, publishing densely worded scholarly essays, to achieve the same manipulation in different groups of people. It is remarked on that the readers of the intelligent publications are further manipulated into liking the material aimed at them by the existence of the populist material, as they are eager to demonstrate their intellectual superiority by reading credulously publications they seem superior.