S6E5 – OSP 3+4 – “Rocketman”

Ransom wakes up from his drugged sleep with a massive headache, but sees a view which is out-of-this-world…

S6E5: “Rocketman” (Download)

Clips

Show Notes

Introduction

Drop-In

• Norman Stone

Quote-of-the-week

“‘Weston! Weston!’ he gasped. ‘What is it? It’s not the Moon, not that size. It can’t be, can it?’ ‘No,’ replied Weston, ‘it’s the Earth.’

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

Episode Movie Title

Chit-Chat

• Discussed what we did on New Year’s Eve:
  • Andrew
    • Worked on a sermon
  • David
    • Watched fireworks and had a curry with former guest-of-the-show, Dr. Holly Ordway
  • Matt
    • Worked and went to bed early!

Toast

• Drinks
  • David was Spotted Cow beer.
  • Matt was drinking Rum Punch.
  • Andrew was drinking Caol Ila 12.
• Foreign language “cheers”
  • “Saha!” (Arabic)
• Patreon toast
  • Tim Taylor
  • We also toasted Mrs. Rempel, who bought her husband, Darnell, a Pints With Jack glass for Christmas.

Addendum

• Back in our Episode #1, we read the book’s dedication to Warnie Lewis, who Jack describes as “a life-long critic of the space-and-time story”. David reached out to former guest-of-show, Dr. Don W. King, whose book on Warnie Lewis has just been released. I asked him about Warnie’s relationship with science fiction:

Warnie liked sci-fi but with the caveat that things not get bogged down in the scientific technicalities of the story—the same reservation Jack had.

Dr. Don W. King, author of “Inkling, Historian, Soldier, and Brother: A Life of Warren Hamilton Lewis “

…[it’s] just a tiresome interruption in a first class story—I don’t want to be told how the damn thing worked, but merely that it did. 

Warren Lewis, (Unpublished) diary excerpt

• Arthur C. Clarke asked C.S. Lewis to address the British Interplanetary Society, but he turned it down.

Story Recap

Philologist Elwin Ransom was on a solo walking holiday in a remote area when he met a lady who sent him on an errand to a house nearby to request that her son be sent home. At the house, Ransom discovers an old school friend, Dick Devine and his colleague, Professor Weston.

Following an invitation to refreshments, he enters the house, but his drink is drugged. While knocked-out he has a strange dream. Returning to consciousness some time later, he tries to escape, but the two men overpower him, knocking him out once more.

The story so far…

Discussion

1. “Ransom wakes up”

It seemed to Ransom that he had never looked out on such a frosty night. Pulsing with brightness as with some unbearable pain or pleasure, clustered in pathless and countless multitudes, dreamlike in clarity, blazing in perfect blackness, the stars seized all his attention, troubled him, excited him, and drew him up to a sitting position.

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

…he was recovering rapidly and even beginning to feel an unnatural lightness of heart and a not disagreeable excitement.

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

• The Light Princess by George MacDonald

Do you realise what you’re saying? Think what Another World means—you might meet anything—anything.”

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (Chapter 2)

“We’ve fallen on our feet and no mistake,” said Peter. “This is going to be perfectly splendid. That old chap will let us do anything we like.”

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chapter 1)

It was a very strange room. The floor was so small that the bed and a table beside it occupied the whole width of it: the ceiling seemed to be nearly twice as wide and the walls sloped outward as they rose, so that Ransom had the impression of lying at the bottom of a deep and narrow wheelbarrow.

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

• Ender’s Game
• Jimmy Akin will be coming the show later this season to talk about the physics in Out of the Silent Planet.

Ransom was by now thoroughly frightened—not with the prosaic fright that a man suffers in a war, but with a heady, bounding kind of fear that was hardly distinguishable from his general excitement: he was poised on a sort of emotional watershed from which, he felt, he might at any moment pass either into delirious terror or into an ecstasy of joy.

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

Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room’, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind.

C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Chapter 1).

2. “That’s no moon…”

• The “man in the moon”
• This book was written in 1938, but the first partial image of earth didn’t come until October 24, 1946, and the really clear ones only began in the mid-sixties.

3. “Annoying questions”

He did not even know what he was afraid of: the fear itself possessed his whole mind, a formless, infinite misgiving.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 4)

I suppose it will save trouble if I deal with these questions at once, instead of leaving you to pester us with them every hour for the next month… If it makes you happy to repeat words that don’t mean anything—which is, in fact, what unscientific people want when they ask for an explanation—you may say we work by exploiting the less observed properties of solar radiation… I don’t think we have much to fear from your scientific attainments

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 4)

Oh please, you don’t even have a PhD!

Sheldon Cooper, Big Bang Theory

• Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
  • On Science Fiction
• A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay
• Venus is often called “The morning star”. Incidentally, this term is used in Scripture:

“I Jesus have sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright morning star.”

Revelation 22:16

4. “The purpose-driven abduction”

If you had minded your own business you would not be here… My only defence is that small claims must give way to great…. You cannot be so small-minded as to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million individuals are of the slightest importance in comparison with this.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 4)

• Concentration Camps
  • Bergen-Belsen
  • Auschwitz

It would be easier if your philosophy of life were not so insufferably narrow and individualistic. I had thought no one could fail to be inspired by the role you are being asked to play: that even a worm, if it could understand, would rise to the sacrifice…

‘Yes—anything whatever…and all educated opinion—for I do not call classics and history and such trash education—is entirely on my side

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 4)

‘It was no idea of ours. We are only obeying orders.’

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 4)

I consider your philosophy of life raving lunacy. I suppose all that stuff about infinity and eternity means that you think you are justified in doing anything—absolutely anything—here and now, on the off chance that some creatures or other descended from man as we know him may crawl about a few centuries longer in some part of the universe.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 4)

• The Abolition of Man

5. “On top of the (tiny, metal) world!”

…the globe of floor is so small that you can always see over the edge of it—over what would be the horizon if you were a flea—and then you see the floors and wall of the next cabin in a different plane. It is just the same on Earth, of course, only we are not big enough to see it

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 4)

Ransom rose and his captor opened the door. Instantly the room was flooded with a dazzling golden light which completely eclipsed the pale earthlight behind him.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 4)

Forgotten the sun? … And what on earth have you kidnapped me for?  … I consider your philosophy of life raving lunacy…

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 4)

6. “A light breakfast”

The light was paler than any light of comparable intensity that he had ever seen; it was not pure white but the palest of all imaginable golds, and it cast shadows as sharp as a floodlight. The heat, utterly free from moisture, seemed to knead and stroke the skin like a gigantic masseur: it produced no tendency to drowsiness: rather, intense alacrity. His headache was gone: he felt vigilant, courageous and magnanimous as he had seldom felt on Earth.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 4)

• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

His is headache was gone: he felt vigilant, courageous and magnanimous as he had seldom felt on Earth

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 4)

• “Tyrant” comes from the Greek word (tyrannos/τύραννος)
• “Rex” is Latin for “King”

And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

Isaiah 6:5-7

A good story isn’t told to make a point. A good story reflects the World God created. The point makes itself.

Timothy Rollins, Commonplace quotation on an episode of The Literary Life Podcast

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision

J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #142 to Robert Murray, S.J. (2nd December 1953)

Question-of-the-week

What would you have done if you were Ransom and woke up on a spaceship?

Question-of-the-week

Wrap-Up

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