Wednesday 17 July 2024

CS Lewis' Place In SF

This evening, my daughter, Aileen, and I saw Freud's Last Session, a film about a fictional dialogue between Sigmund Freud and CS Lewis at the outbreak of World War II. A young Oxford academic did visit Freud at that time...

Lewis is part of the story that we tell here. He replied to Wells and Stapledon. Anderson and Blish wrote in the tradition of Wells and Stapledon but also addressed issues raised by Lewis. The Problem Of Pain is a work of Christian apologetics by Lewis. "The Problem of Pain" is an Ythrian short story in Anderson's Technic History.

Lewis, like many sf authors, has his own particular fictional race of Martians and much of his fiction is related to World War II. Watching Lewis responding to an air raid siren, I thought of the future.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Dang! I never realized it before, now I think Anderson named his story using the title of Lewis's THE PROBLEM OF PAIN. Makes me think he read some of Lewis' works.

Ad astra! Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

Lewis is an entertaining writer. He's extremely smart, and extremely old-fashioned intellectually in some respects -- I don't think he understood science, for example; when he does a scientific character, they're usually of a mid-Victorian type.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Mr. Stirling!

I've read a fair number of Lewis' works and found them interesting and entertaining. I think Lewis was better at straight up theological fantasies of the kind seen in THE GREAT DIVORCE of THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. That compensates for his weaknesses as regards science.

Ad astra! Sean