The Space Trilogy - Influences and Approach

Influences and Approach

Lewis stated in a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green:

What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and an essay in J.B.S. Haldane's Possible Worlds both of which seemed to take the idea of such travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook which I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary ideas as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own point of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side. I think H. G. Wells's First Men in the Moon the best of the sort I have read…

The other main literary influence was David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920); "The real father of my planet books is David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, which you also will revel in if you don’t know it. I had grown up on Well’s stories of that kind: it was Lindsay who first gave me the idea that the ‘scientifiction’ appeal could be combined with the ‘supernatural’ appeal".

The books are not especially concerned with technological speculation, and in many ways read like fantasy adventures combined with themes of biblical history and classical mythology. Like most of Lewis's mature writing, they contain much discussion of contemporary rights and wrongs, similar in outlook to Madeleine L'Engle's Kairos series. The kidnapping of Ransom by Dr Weston is reminiscent of Flash Gordon being forced into Dr Hans Zarkov's spaceship. Many of the names in the trilogy reflect the influence of Lewis' friend J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish languages.