S6E10 – OSP 9+10 – “First Contact”

Ransom makes “first contact” with a new alien race…

S6E10: “First Contact” (Download)

Clips

Show Notes

Introduction

Drop-In

• Dr. Crystal Hurd

Quote-of-the-week

The creature was talking. It had language. If you are not yourself a philologist, I am afraid you must take on trust the prodigious emotional consequences of this realization in Ransom’s mind.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

Episode Movie Title

Chit-Chat

• Matt
  • Both Matt and Andrew are feeling under the weather!
• Andrew
  • At the time of recording, was just ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.
    • Professor Kate Sonderegger gave the sermon.
    • Malcolm and Phil’s poem were revealed.
  • Went to the Mere Anglicanism conference, met the guys from the Lamp-post Listener and The Inklings Variety Hour.
  • His interview with Bryan Zhang from the That’ll Preach was published.

I, King, have dealt with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 5)

• David
  • Hosted a discussion at a bookclub with his brothers-in-law on Till We Have Faces and did his best Andrew Lazo impression.
  • Had my bottom two wisdom teeth extracted.

Toast

• Drinks
  • David was drinking Auchentoshan and water.
  • Matt was drinking tea.
  • Andrew was drinking coffee.
• Foreign language “cheers”
  • “За здоровье!” (Russian)
• Patreon toast
  • Andrew Thomas

Story Recap

While on a walking holiday, Philologist Elwin Ransom stops at a house where he is drugged by two men, Weston and Devine.

He wakes up on a spaceship travelling to a planet which his captors call “Malacandra”, and he discovers over the course of the voyage that they plan to give him to aliens called “Sorns”, probably as a human sacrifice.

Upon landing on the planet, Weston and Devine try to hand him over, but are attacked by some water creature and Ransom escapes in the confusion. After fleeing for some time, Ransom falls asleep exhausted by a stream.

The story so far in 100 words…

Discussion

1. “Not a morning person”

But for the rest, the war – the frights, …the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, …all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy (Chapter 12)

• Companion to Narnia, Revised Edition: A Complete Guide to the Magical World of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia by Paul F. Ford

For the first time a suspicion that he might be dead and already in the ghost-life crossed his mind.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 3)

And Edmund for the first time in this story felt sorry for someone besides himself.

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Chapter 11)

He [Eustace] began, almost for the first time in his life, to feel lonely. 

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Chapter 5)

He was quite aware of the danger of madness, and applied himself vigorously to his devotions and his toilet…. Perhaps he was mad already, and not really on Malacandra but safe in bed in an English asylum. If only it might be so! He would ask Ransom—curse it! there his mind went playing the same trick again… He learned to stand still mentally, as it were, and let them roll over his mind. It was no good bothering about them. When they were gone you could resume sanity again. 

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

“Why should your heart not dance?”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part I, Chapter 9)

2. “Space giraffes”

The description of the mountains:

…greenish-white objects which he had seen across the lake at their first landing…

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

Here, he understood, was the full statement of that perpendicular theme which beast and plant and earth all played on Malacandra—here in this riot of rock, leaping and surging skyward like solid jets from some rock-fountain…

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

• Jack Black

…round, shining, black thing like a cannonball came into sight…. a puffing mouth bearded with bubbles. …gleaming black. … it splashed and wallowed to the shore and rose, steaming, on its hind legs—six or seven feet high and too thin for its height, like everything in Malacandra. It had a coat of thick black hair, lucid as seal-skin…

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

… these were articulate noises. The creature was talking. It had language. If you are not yourself a philologist, I am afraid you must take on trust the prodigious emotional consequences of this realization in Ransom’s mind. A new world he had already seen—but a new, an extra-terrestrial, a non-human language was a different matter. 

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

…his imagination had leaped over every fear and hope and probability of his situation to follow the dazzling project of making a Malacandrian grammar. An Introduction to the Malacandrian language—The Lunar verb—A concise Martian-English Dictionary . . . the titles flitted through his mind. And what might one not discover from the speech of a non-human race? The very form of language itself, the principle behind all possible languages, might fall into his hands.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

Minute after minute in utter silence the representatives of two so far-divided species stared each into the other’s face.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

Ransom dropped down on his stomach and drank, cursing a world where cold water appeared to be unobtainable… Ransom rose to his knees. The creature leaped back, watching him intently, and they became motionless again.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

• S6E6 – AH – “A Compass for Deep Heaven”, After Hours with Dr. Diana Glyer

It was like a courtship—like the meeting of the first man and the first woman in the world…

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

“What? You too? I thought I was the only one”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

• Hross (singular – masculine) Hrossa (plural) which means “horse” in Old Islandic and possibly has
• The Hross seem to like “H” sounds – he calls Ransom “Hman”. Cf. Guliver’s Travels and the Houyhnhnms.
• Earth (the element) = “Handra”
• The planet = “Malacandra” (the “h” disappears after “c”)
• Hears the word “Handramit”, noting that it’s “handra” with a suffix, but he’s not sure what that means.

…it was really very like an earthly boat; only later did he set himself the question, ‘What else could a boat be like?’

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

The huge, seal-like creature seated beside him became unbearably ominous. It seemed friendly; but it was very big, very black, and he knew nothing at all about it. What were its relations to the sorns? And was it really as rational as it appeared?

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

Nothing could be more disgusting than the one impression; nothing more delightful than the other. It all depended on the point of view.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 9)

His whole imaginative training somehow encouraged him to associate superhuman intelligence with monstrosity of form and ruthlessness of will. To step on board the hross’s boat might mean surrendering himself to sorns at the other end of the journey. On the other hand, the hross’s invitation might be a golden opportunity of leaving the sorn-haunted forests for ever.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 10)

7. “Baby, let’s cruise…”

In a few seconds they were racing forward at some fifteen miles an hour and rising and falling on the strange, sharp, perpendicular waves of Malacandra with a jerky motion quite unlike that of the choppiest sea that Ransom had ever met on Earth… Thank heaven he was a good sailor! At least a fairly good sailor. At least—— It was not thus that the first representative of humanity would choose to appear before a new species… He was rapidly losing all interest in Malacandra: the distinction between Earth and other planets seemed of no importance compared with the awful distinction of earth and water.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 10)

…on a low cultural level—and the séroni were gods or demons

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 10)

He felt some fear, but more a ghastly inappropriateness. He wanted men—any men, even Weston and Devine.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 10)

“No people find each other more absurd than lovers”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

Wrap-Up

Concluding Thoughts

• A concise Martian-English Dictionary

Question-of-the-week

What’s your favourite book or movie which depicts “first contact” between two alien races?

Question-of-the-week

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