S6E1 – OSP (Introduction) – “Ad Astra”

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We begin Season 6 by looking at the background of this season’s book, Out of the Silent Planet.

S6E1: “Ad Astra” (Download)

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Clips

Show Notes

Introduction

Drop-In

Quote-of-the-week

Space: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Pints With Jack. Its 5-year mission: To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no Podcast has gone before.

Star Trek opening monologue (kinda)

Episode Movie Title

  • Ad Astra (2019), starring Brad Pitt. The title is a Latin phrase which means “to the stars” and has its origins in the Roman poet Virgil, who wrote in the Aeneid: “…sic itur ad astra…”, which means “thus one journeys to the stars”.

Chit-Chat

  • Matt
    • Looking forward to this season
    • David tricked him into learning stuff by interviewing experts
    • Enjoying the new microphone setup – saves his back!
  • David
    • Sorry for the delay in starting this season – everything took a little longer to prepare.

Toast

Discussion

1. “Catch up”

  • Andrew
  • Matt
    • His main data scientist has taken a job with Google, so he has one month to wrap up a massive year-long project.
  • David
    • Alexander has been waking up at 5am…
    • Did quite a bit of work on our website, primarily tidying up the episode pages for our back catalogue, but also put together an essays page.
    • More of the wife’s family and friends have moved to Wisconsin.
    • Visited England with his wife and child, including London, the Lake District, and Oxford. In Oxford they visited the Kilns (where they met listener Mary Jane McCloskey) and later that day he addressed the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society.
    • Hasn’t got very far on his book about The Four Loves, but will be working over Christmas on an annotated version of G.K. Chesterton’s famous book, Orthodoxy.

2. “Season Overview”

3. “Favourite Sci-Fi”

4. “Initial Impressions”

  • What were our initial impressions of the book?
    • Matt
      • In college read it with its sequel, Paralandra, . Didn’t think much of it until he reread it for this season and interviewed some of our guests
    • Andrew
      • First read it thirty years ago when binging C.S. Lewis.
    • David
      • Was expecting Star Wars initially so was disappointed, but it has very much improved on rereadings.

5. “Chronology & Key Ideas”

  • Andrew thinks the chronology is important. The book is published in 1938, his first foray into fiction, before his apologetics works. It was read in its entirety to the Inklings a couple .

But if only there were someone with a richer talent and more leisure, I believe this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelisation of England: any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance [fiction] without their knowing it.

Letter from C.S. Lewis to Sister Penelope
  • Echos of Preface to Paradise Lost and has arthurian themes.
  • Embraces the Medieval Model of the Cosmos (cf Planet Narnia, The Discarded Image).
  • Considers the spiritual relevance of science-fiction, particularly colonization.
  • CSL loved science-fiction, such as David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) and H.G. Wells. Lewis received a copy of The First Men in the Moon in the Christmas 1908 and was a life-long reader of Wells.

6. “Book Origin”

  • CSL and JRR had a discussion and agreed that Lewis would write a space travel and Tolkien a time travel story. CSL published Silent Planet in 1938 but JRR never completed The Lost Road.
  • Andrew assigned Matt Tolkien’s book, Leaf by Niggle. He also mentioned The Notion Club Papers and Lancia Smith’s website, The Cultivating Project.

7. “Reception”

  • David suggested that the book well received because it was well-written and fun, even if most people didn’t seem to notice that Lewis was doing something deeper.

But if only there were someone with a richer talent and more leisure, I believe this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelisation of England: any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance [fiction] without their knowing it.

Letter from C.S. Lewis to Sister Penelope

In the Author’s mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariably begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form: verse or prose, short story, novel, play or what not. When these two things click you have the Author’s impulse complete. It is now a thing inside him pawing to get out. He longs to see this bubbling stuff pouring into that Form as the housewife longs to see the new jam pouring into the clean jam jar. This nags him all day long and gets in the way of his work and his sleep and his meals. It’s like being in love.

C.S. Lewis, Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said

8. “Companion Reading”

By and by Man will try
To get out into the sky,
Sailing far beyond the air
From Down and Here to Up and There.
Stars and sky, sky and stars
Make us feel the prison bars.

C.S. Lewis, Science-fiction Cradlesong

“Think what Another World means—you might meet anything—anything.”

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (Digory)

9. “The Dedication”

TO MY BROTHER W. H. L. a life-long critic of the space-and-time story

Out of the Silent Planet Dedication

Question-of-the-week

…in your opinion, what is the best Sci-Fi book or movie?

Question-of-the-week

Wrap-Up

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Posted in Andrew, Audio Discussion, David, Matt, Out Of The Silent Planet, Podcast Episode, Season 6 and tagged .

David

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After working as a Software Engineer in England for several years, David moved to the United States in 2008, where he settled in San Diego. Then, in 2020 he married his wife, Marie, and moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin. Together they have a son, Alexander, who is adamant that Narnia should be read publication order.