Lewis, Blish And Anderson

We find similarities and dissimilarities between works by CS Lewis, James Blish and Poul Anderson. We are currently considering:

the Ransom Trilogy (soft sf) and Surprised By Joy (spiritual autobiography) by Lewis;

the After Such Knowledge Trilogy (mixed genres), the Cities In Flight Tetralogy (hard sf) and The Quincunx Of Time (hard sf) by Blish;

several historical novels and historical fantasies and two later future histories by Anderson.

The Ransom Trilogy, Volume III, That Hideous Strength, mentions Prospero and Roger Bacon on the same page during a discussion of magic, thus indirectly linking this novel both to Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest and to After Such Knowledge, Volume I, Doctor Mirabilis.

In addition to historical novels and historical fantasy novels, Anderson wrote some intermediate works that were historical fiction with an element of fantasy. This description might also fit Doctor Mirabilis since Bacon's inner voice, inspiring him to seek the scientia universalis, is possibly demonic. In the Ransom Trilogy, Volume II, Perelandra, Elwin Ransom, a Christian philologist, contends with the demonically possessed physicist, Weston, on the sinless planet, Venus. In After Such Knowledge, Volume III, A Case Of Conscience, Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a Jesuit biologist, contends with an atheist physicist, Cleaver, on the sinless planet, Lithia.

We find some common ideas. However, a philosophical gulf divides Lewis from hard sf writers like Blish and Anderson. This is how Lewis summarized the philosophical position that he had held before his religious conversion:

"We maintained that abstract thought (if obedient to logical rules) gave indisputable truth..."

-CS Lewis, Surprised By Joy (London, 1964), XIII, p. 167.

Logical abstract thought gives indisputable truth? Not observation or experiment?

Roger Bacon, quoted by James Blish:

"Neither the voice of authority, nor the weight of reason and argument are as significant as experiment..."

-Roger Bacon, De erroribus medicorum, quoted in James Blish, Doctor Mirabilis IN Blish, After Such Knowledge (London, 1991), pp. 1-318 AT NOTES, p. 315.

Lewis was a prescientific Platonist.

According to Blish, Bacon defined scientific thinking as we understand it and invented:

"...the theory of theories as tools." (p. 316)

In Cities In Flight, Volume IV, The Triumph Of Time, Bacon is described as the inventor of scientific method. Thus, Doctor Mirabilis, although historical fiction, could be regarded as a remote prequel to Cities In Flight and indeed to hard sf in general.

Lewis' Venerian Adam prophesies a supernatural apocalypse millennia hence whereas Blish's characters in The Quincunx Of Time encounter many scientific paradigms in messages from their future and Anderson presents technologically dominated futures in his later future histories, the Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy and Genesis.