Trivia / The Space Trilogy

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: Weston's explanation that his ship operates by "exploiting the less observed properties of solar radiation" was meant as a Hand Wave by C. S. Lewis, who was no scientist and said that the mechanics of space travel were not relevant to the story. Later on, he was amused to learn that spacecraft powered by solar wind were indeed being developed.
• Defictionalization:
  • In keeping with the new British tendency to de-fictionalize literature critical of the local government (i.e. Nineteen Eighty-Four), there now really IS a N.I.C.E., and the cynical see it heading in the Police State direction. (In Real Life it stands for the National Institute of Clinical Excellence, an organisation which decides whether drugs are worth the cost for the NHS to buy or not. The unfortunately coincidental choice of acronym makes it easily demonized by American "death panel" anti-Obamacare propagandists, and people who are upset that it won't pay millions of pounds for drugs that might give end-stage cancer patients a few more months of life.)
  • The stated goals of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (who, granted, are a fringe group of a fringe group) are starting to sound quite a bit like the secret goals of N.I.C.E., just without the transhumanism.
• Science Marches On:
  • The canals on Malacandra. Science had already questioned the existence of canals on Mars and Lewis was aware of this, but included the canals anyway.
  • Also the oceans of Perelandra, back before it was learned that the surface of Venus was a volcanic wasteland hot enough to melt lead. One of the sorns in Out of the Silent Planet actually mentions that any being from "Parelandra" would logically find Mars too cold to survive in^note And Ransom, on his return to Earth from Perelandra and its climate after about a year, keeps asking his friends if they don't feel a bit chilly, but Lewis clearly changed his mind to make for a better story.
• What Could Have Been: The Dark Tower, a fragment story that got abandoned in favor of taking the sequels in a very different direction.
• Write What You Know: According to Word of God, the reason the villains in That Hideous Strength are university professors and administrators is not that Lewis thought college faculty were particularly prone to evil but "because my own is the only profession I know well enough to write about."
• Write Who You Know:
  • Ransom is explicitly based on J. R. R. Tolkien — he teaches the same subject at Cambridge that Tolkien taught at Oxford. (Although in the third book, he seems more like Charles Williams.) Tolkien was on the record as saying that he didn't think it was a very close resemblance, although he did recognize some of his own ideas "Lewisified" in Ransom.
  • MacPhee, an Ulster rationalist and Sarcastic Devotee from That Hideous Strength, may have been a fictionalized version of Lewis' old tutor William Kirkpatrick. The author says that MacPhee is pretty much Kirkpatrick; right down to his phrasing.

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