(urth) Gollancz list

[James Wynn]

On 8/7/2011 3:51 AM, David Duffy wrote:
> I found _His Hideous Strength_ unreadable for that reason, but not the 
> first two of the Space Trilogy.  But everything by Charles Williams is 
> delicious.  Actually, this makes we wonder if there are any Wolfean 
> allusions to Williams?  I have never read _A computer iterates the 
> greater trumps_ -- is there anything there?

Interesting. I found _Perelandra_ much more preachy than _That Hideous 
Strength_ -- one metaphor after another. And for that reason found it 
tedious to work through (even though a couple of the lessons are pretty 
good ones). _THS_ did have nasty villains of a very tendentious type, 
but each was a quite unique character of a particular kind of 
intellectual. The novel was very much character-driven (with the 
exception of Ransom whose character-- for this novel -- withdrew into 
the wallpaper. But that is for the good of the story IMO). When I first 
read it as a teenager, I had never before read anything that so casually 
dispensed with the "walls" I believed surrounded genres (SF, Fantasy, 
Spy Thriller).

J.

PS Some are revolted by Merlin's severe chastisement of "the wife" for 
using birth-control. But I think this ought to be juxtaposed with the 
otter martians in _Out of the Silent Planet_ who couldn't understand 
that some humans had as many children as they could. For that reason, 
I'm not certain that Lewis's own opinion can be derived from these bits. 
It is merely different points of view: One from a species that has for 
millennia lived in scarcity and one from a man who can see "what might 
have been".