That Hideous Strength : : a Modern Fairy-Tale for Grownups

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Conclusion of a space trilogy begun with Out of the silent plant and continued in Perelandra.
Sale of college property -- Dinner with the Sub-Warden -- Belbury and St. Anne's-on-the-Hill -- The liquidation of anachronisms -- Elasticity -- Fog -- The Pendragon -- Moonlight at Belbury -- The Saracen's Head -- The conquered city -- Battle begun -- Wet and windy night -- They have pulled down deep Heaven on their heads -- "Real life is meeting" -- The descent of the gods -- Banquet at Belbury -- Venus at St. Anne's.
The final book in C. S. Lewis's acclaimed Space Trilogy, which includes Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, That Hideous Strength concludes the adventures of the matchless Dr. Ransom. The dark forces that were repulsed in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra are massed for an assault on the planet Earth itself. Word is on the wind that the mighty wizard Merlin has come back to the land of the living after many centuries, holding the key to ultimate power for that force which can find him and bend him to its will. A sinister technocratic organization is gaining power throughout Europe with a plan to "recondition" society, and it is up to Ransom and his friends to squelch this threat by applying age-old wisdom to a new universe dominated by science. The two groups struggle to a climactic resolution that brings the Space Trilogy to a magnificent, crashing close.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

A finale worthy of the series submitted by pkooger on September 19, 2011, 12:28pm That Hideous Strength is an excellent contribution to a classic sci-fi series, and a strong example of C.S. Lewis' trademark allegorical style. The third and final installment of Lewis' Space Trilogy is longer than the first two combined. The first two books were told from the perspective of the philologist, Ransom. Ransom is also a character in the third book, but the story is told from the perspective of various characters, chiefly Mark and Jane Studdock, a young newly-wed couple. Mark and Jane are being pulled in different directions by the forces of good and evil. Mark comes under the sway of a powerful pseudo-scientific organization whose ultimate secret goal is the ethnic cleansing of all organic life off the face of the earth. Jane becomes involved with a tiny group of people with some very powerful non-human friends whose goal is to prevent the looming planetary holocaust.

Lewis wrote this book at the time of World War II, when a very real holocaust was taking place. The evil organization in his book, as well as some of the experiments they perform and their general lack of scientific ethics, coincides directly with the Nazi government and its scientists. Lewis alludes to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the story. Lewis is nothing if not an author who writes from the convictions of his own heart, and his novels reflect that. If you enjoy sci-fi (or speculative fiction) that makes you think about the nature of right and wrong, you owe it to yourself to pick up this series.

Not a Huge Fan submitted by KatieD on August 19, 2021, 11:52am I really love C.S. Lewis and I thoroughly enjoyed the other books in the Space Trilogy. I really felt that this one fell flat a bit. It introduces too many new characters and has a very different tone from the two books before it. It's also much longer as if there was a lot more that Lewis wanted to do and he was trying to put it all into this one book. I think that, on its own, it would be a good story, but it didn't really seem to fit with the rest of the trilogy.