That Hideous Strength

Couverture
Simon and Schuster, 1996 - 380 pages
64 Avis
Written during the dark hours immediately before and during the Second World War, C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, of which That Hideous Strength is the third volume, stands alongside such works as Albert Camus's The Plague and George Orwell's 1984 as a timely parable that has become timeless, beloved by succeeding generations as much for the sheer wonder of its storytelling as for the significance of its moral concerns. For the trilogy's central figure, C. S. Lewis created perhaps the most memorable character of his career, the brilliant, clear-eyed, and fiercely brave philologist Dr. Elwin Ransom. Appropriately, Lewis modeled Dr. Ransom on his dear friend J. R. R. Tolkien, for in the scope of its imaginative achievement and the totality of its vision of not one but two imaginary worlds, the Space Trilogy is rivaled in this century only by Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Readers who fall in love with Lewis's fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia as children unfailingly cherish his Space Trilogy as adults; it, too, brings to life strange and magical realms in which epic battles are fought between the forces of light and those of darkness. But in the many layers of its allegory, and the sophistication and piercing brilliance of its insights into the human condition, it occupies a place among the English language's most extraordinary works for any age, and for all time.
In That Hideous Strength, the final installment of the Space Trilogy, the dark forces that have been repulsed in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra are massed for an assault on the planet Earth itself. Word is on the wind that the mighty wizard Merlin has come back to the land of the living after many centuries, holding the key to ultimate power for the force that can find him and bend him to its will. A sinister technocratic organization that is gaining force throughout England, N.I.C.E. (the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments), secretly controlled by humanity's mortal enemies, plans to use Merlin in their plot to "recondition" society. Dr. Ransom forms a countervailing group, Logres, in opposition, and the two groups struggle to a climactic resolution that brings the Space Trilogy to a magnificent, crashing close.
 

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LibraryThing Review

Avis d'utilisateur  - Darrell.Newton - LibraryThing

Although written for an earlier generation, this book still speaks to us today -- something nearly impossible to do with a near-future science fiction novel. Most tend to be outdated within thirty ... Consulter l'avis complet

LibraryThing Review

Avis d'utilisateur  - Cataloger623 - LibraryThing

There are far better reviews of this novel read them for their deep insights into this novel. That Hideous Strength is the third part of the only set of science fiction novels C.S. Lewis ever wrote ... Consulter l'avis complet

Table des matières

Te Conquered City
202
Battle Begun
228
Wet and Windy Night
246
They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads
268
Lie Is Meeting
292
The Descent of the Gods
317
Banquet at Belbury
340
V?mms a Si Awwes
357

The Saracens Head
178

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Page 9 - It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.
Page 38 - take-it-or-leave-it' nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it'll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we'll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain.
Page 320 - Badon Hill, the long banner of the Virgin fluttering above the heavy British-Roman cataphracts, the yellow-haired barbarians. He heard the snap of the bows, the click-click of steel points in wooden shields, the cheers, the howling, and the ring of struck mail. He remembered also the evening, fires twinkling along the hill, frost making the gashes smart, starlight on a pool fouled with blood, eagles crowding together in the pale sky. And Ransom, it may be, remembered his long struggle in the caves...
Page 38 - Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest — which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can.
Page 180 - It must be remembered that in Mark's mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical — merely "Modern.
Page 189 - There's such a thing as loyalty," said Jane. MacPhee, who had been carefully shutting up the snuff-box, suddenly looked up with a hundred Covenanters in his eyes. " There is, ma'am," he said. " As you get older you will learn that it is a virtue too important to be lavished on individual personalities." At that moment there was a knock at the door. " Come in," said MacPhee, and Camilla entered.
Page 167 - It would hardly be the same as a real tree," said Winter. "But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess.
Page 67 - That's what happens when you study men: you find mare's nests. I happen to believe that you can't study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.
Page 97 - Belbury had enclosed about twenty acres with a low brick wall surmounted by an iron railing, and laid it all out in what his contractor called Ornamental Pleasure Grounds. There were trees dotted about and winding paths covered so thickly with round white pebbles that you could hardly walk on them. There were immense flower beds, some oblong, some lozenge-shaped, and some crescents. There were plantations — slabs would be almost a better word — of that kind of laurel which looks as if it were...

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À propos de l'auteur (1996)

Clive Staples Lewis, born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1898, was for more than thirty years Fellow and Tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford, and at the time of his death in 1963 was professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University. His many books -- of fiction, poetry, theology, literary scholarship, and autobiography -- include The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, Miracles, and the seven volumes that comprise The Chronicles of Narnia.

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