Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been going back and reading some C.S. Lewis books because, I'll be honest, I still like C. S. Lewis as a philosopher and author. I'm not really too seduced by Christianity as he presents it (or, frankly, at all), but he still has some interesting things to say. Although you can basically ignore any of his commentary on women.

I read his SF trilogy as a borderline fundamentalist adventist teenager who was constantly looking for fantasy outlets away from the religion, and C.S. Lewis was one of the few I was "allowed" to read at the time. Re-reading it has been quite a trip.

I mean, the story is kind of a christian wish-fulfillment of the creation story if it had gone right. He uses different words for god, the devil and angels, but the metaphors are pretty transparent. God creates new life on Venus (written in the 1940s, when we didn't really know what lay under the clouds of Venus), and one man from a fallen Earth (thulcandra, which is kind of an awesome name for Earth) is brought to witness it and thwart the devil in corrupting this new world too.

It all starts as a pretty solid classic SF adventure. The early exploration of Venus (perelandra), the floating islands, the wildlife, etc. are all pretty good if you like exploration fiction. The christian allegory takes over the narrative more and more as the story goes on though, especially once he meets Perelandra's Eve.

The best part of the book I did not remember at all, which is how freaking scary the devil is in this story. From entrance to exit, every encounter with the devil would not be out of place in a modern horror novel. The gore and the mind games were all genuinely creepy to me this time around, even in my current state of highly developed cynicism. Almost worth it just for that. Lewis actually knows how craft a terrifying antagonist.

The last few pages turns into some christian ecstatic mess that I more or less skimmed because it felt like an alter call more than anything. But still, if you can put the heavy-handed christian allegory a little bit to the side, there's a still some solid classic SF meat here for the curious SF reader.

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The More Beautiful World your Heart Knows is Possible

The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible by Charles Eisenstein
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book encapsulates many of the ideas I've been groping towards since leaving my religion and coming out of the closet. It starts with the premise that we all want a more beautiful world and have a concept of human flourishing that is different from the actuality of the world today. From there, he asks what kinds of changes in attitude and behaviors we would have to make in order to make that world possible.

It's a very optimistic book, one that supposes everyone deep down wants the same kind of happiness and that if we focused more on kindness and let go of the judgement we would find our way there. It's less of a specific guidepost to utopia though, and more the start of a discussion of what that would look like, which is really why I love the book. If we're going to make the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, we have to start talking about what that actually looks like, no? If we stop ourselves from even discussing the possibility of better as unrealistic then we certainly forestall any hope of meaningful change. The first step to a better world? Stop telling ourselves it's impossible.

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