Wednesday, 6 February 2019

"We Shall All Be Changed"

CS Lewis' Elwin Ransom and Poul Anderson's Peter Koskinen return to Earth from Mars.

Ransom
Ransom's colleague, Lewis, writes:

"Even the journey to Mars was bad enough. A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. One can't put the difference into words. When the man is a friend it may become painful: the old footing is not easy to recover."
-CS Lewis, Perelandra IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 145-348 AT 1, p. 150.

Ransom returns from Malacandra, then from Perelandra, able to converse in Solar with the space-dwelling eldila and becomes the Pendragon of Logres.

Koskinen...
...remembers oneness with the Martians and:

"...perhaps the grisliest thing he had found on Earth so far was the isolation of human beings from each other.
"But what else could result, when a man was one atom in a deaf, dumb, blind, automated machine?"
-Poul Anderson, Shield (New York, 1970), IX, p. 72.

Time spent off Earth enhances awareness of problems back on Earth.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I am not as sure as Lewis' character Ransom that merely spending time on another planet would change people that MUCH. I can expect people who live on Mars to have some changes of thought, mind, perspective, etc., because of the different circumstances in where and how they lived. But not quite the way Lewis may have thought would happen.

Sean