apocalypse

Extended Book Break: The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis

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I was blessed, on my trip to Michigan and back in the past few weeks, to listen to The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis in its entirety. The version available on Audible, narrated by Geoffrey Howard, is approximately 24 hours of continuous listening, and worth every minute. The three books of The Space Trilogy were certainly inspired by classic science fiction of the last century, but combine these influences with fantasy, mythology, horror and Christian theology.

  • The first book, Out of the Silent Planet, is the most sci-fi of the three, delving into interplanetary space flight and exploration, extraterrestrial life-forms and more. A British linguist named Ransom is shanghaied onto a spaceship bound for a nearby planet known by its native inhabitants as Malacandra. He escapes his captors to discover multiple rational animals with very different appearances, skills and abilities, and cultures, who nevertheless live together in good-humored and mutually beneficial peace. Slowly Ransom abandons his earthly notions of power, control, and desire and strives to help the natives against the other Earthlings who seek to exploit them.
  • The second book, Perelandra, is a science-fantasy tale also involving interplanetary travel and extraterrestrial life to frame a retelling of the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Ransom agrees to travel to the planet Perelandra on an urgent mission, but with no idea what that mission is. He encounters a lone humanoid woman who lives in harmony with the world and creatures around her and is searching for her man. An old adversary arrives from Earth to tempt the woman into disobeying the higher powers she knows on Perelandra, and Ransom must again fight against his fellow man as well as demonic activity to save a pristine world from importing Earth’s sin.
  • The final book, That Hideous Strength, is as long as the first two books combined and takes place entirely on Earth, specifically, in England. It continues Ransom’s tale in a story combining dystopian fiction, Arthurian legend and horror to critique materialism, modernism, politics, education and contemporary ideas of gender and marriage. It follows a young sociologist striving to get ahead in his career by joining a new and increasingly powerful national scientific insitute, while his wife, who is struggling with bad dreams that appear to predict the future, falls in with a small band of local resistance led by an eccentric old linguist who is rumored to be contact with powerful extraterrestrials who are pure spirit and are preparing for a final battle over the fate of the Earth.
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Book Break: A Canticle for Leibowitz

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LeibowitzBeing without work these past few weeks, I’ve had more time than usual to read. Last weekend, I finished Walter M. Miller’s 1959 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, a book recommended to me by three of the smartest men I know. Set in post-apocalyptic America in the centuries following a nuclear holocaust, it tells the story of the monks of the Albertine Order of Leibowitz, who scratch their livelihood from the rocks and dust of the southwestern deserts and dedicate themselves to their founder’s mission of extracting knowledge from the rubble of the previous civilization and preserving it for the future. Continue reading →

The Virgin and the Tempest

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The Virgin and the Tempest

Blogger’s Note: A close friend’s home was struck hard by the storm last Sunday morning—in all the wreck and ruin, Mary stood untouched, unfazed. Regina pacis, ora pro nobis!

At dawn she stood upon the hill and pondered things unseen;

The lake agleam with silver sun, the grass a rippling green.

A girl, she seemed, of field and fen, of flock and fish and sheaves;

Her crown, the dappled sunlight filtered through the flutt’ring leaves.

Her simple shift immaculate as she, herself unstained,

Enjoyed Creation’s morning-song—but in the west it rained.

 

Such peaceful virgin beauty could the Tempest not abide:

He spied her from afar and surged, a league to every stride.

He stormed and splashed and shivered homes; his thund’ring voice was heard—

With roar and flash and flood he sought to drown God’s holy Word.

In that unearthly twilight knelt the faithful ’round the stone,

And she, exposed and downcast, stood upon the hill alone.

 

He strode ashore in bloody rage, devouring as he came,

But naught would slake his appetite except the Virgin’s shame.

He cursed her with his forkéd tongue and lashed her with his tail;

He frothed and foamed and spewed his bile, he struck with tooth and nail.

The trees he snapped like kindling with the fury of his wings;

They came down crashing roundabout—but she began to sing.

 

Her hands were open to receive, her eyes closed in repose,

And all his filth and flotsam could not even foul her clothes.

She sang a canticle of joy, of gratitude and grace,

And deadfalls burst asunder at the radiance of her face.

A lullaby she sang to soothe the Child within her womb,

And at His Name, the Tempest turned and fled into the gloom.

 

The wood lays wasted at her feet; the grass, strewn with debris;

A splintered path of ruin marks the path on which he flees.

So stands she still upon the hill, our shelter from the storm—

Our Lady, Queen of Peace, protecting all she loves from harm.

Not David’s solitary stone nor Sparta’s gory stand

Struck such a blow as she, although she never raised a hand!

Book Break: Lord of the World

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This past spring I ran across an Aleteia blog post relaying that both our current pontiff, Pope Francis, and our Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, have recommended the same novel to the Catholic reading public. The book–Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World–is a dystopian novel about the coming of the Antichrist and the end of the world. So I bought a cheap copy for Kindle and have since devoured it. I could not put it down.

Monsignor Benson was the son of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury who converted to Catholicism and was ordained a priest. Though he and his work are not as well known today, he was praised in his time by great Catholic writers like Hilaire Belloc, and today by the likes of Joseph Pearce. Pearce has this to say about Lord of the World:

The world depicted in Lord of the World is one where creeping secularism and Godless humanism have triumphed over religion and traditional morality. It is a world where philosophical relativism has triumphed over objectivity; a world where, in the name of tolerance, religious doctrine is not tolerated. It is a world where euthanasia is practiced widely and religion hardly practiced at all. The lord of this nightmare world is a benign-looking politician intent on power in the name of “peace,” and intent on the destruction of religion in the name of “truth.” In such a world, only a small and shrinking Church stands resolutely against the demonic “Lord of the World.”

The novel was written in 1907, but from the world it creates, I would have guessed it had been published after one or both of the World Wars. It does feel prophetic, though I’ve ceased to be surprised by this, given the number of literary classics I’ve read in recent years that seem as though they fit our times. But Benson’s book is short, gripping, dark, terrifying at times–and beautifully represents the challenges of living a Catholic faith in a world with little use for it.

That said, it is a very Catholic book and may not be enjoyed as much by non-Catholics (unless, God willing, they have a heart very much open to learning about the faith). The cheap download for Kindle have numerous typos, but Ave Maria Press has a new edition out for those who prefer print anyway. I recommend it wholeheartedly.