Into the Wardrobe

I'm bugged when the details are glaringly inaccurate in a story I read (or watch on television: see below) unless they're the sort of details that aren't supposed to be accurate. The fact that there's no "Edgestow" or "Cure Hardy" on the maps of England I can find, or that there are no "Canals" on Mars or that Weston's ship looks like nothing NASA (or the Russians) ever launched is less of an issue to this reader than when "Abu" is treated as a given name (S. R. Lawhead's Celtic Crusades, book #3--- in Arabic, "Abu" means "father of" and would be followed by the man's oldest son's name, as in "Abu Ismeel" or such) or the kid brother in a CSI episode turns out to have "told off" his older bro and just ordered him to go home (supposedly kid bro pulls a gun on Mom's boyfriend, who pulls a knife: when big bro tries to intervene he's accidentally stabbed, then kid shoots the boyfriend and tells his brother to "just go home"; of course, the bro's also mortally wounded, yada yada yada... They get the forensics right but the psycology of the character relationships isn't worth a tin nickel.)

As to Haldane's review: "Mr. Lewis’s idea is clear enough. The application of science to human affairs can only lead to hell." Here is a man who most singularly, distinctly, definitively does not get it. He says later on that "Parenthetically, I should have thought the most striking character of a language used by sinless beings who loved their neighbours as themselves would have been the absence of any equivalent of the word “my” and very probably of the word “I,” and of other personal pronouns and inflexions," and the first thing that comes to mind is from Lewis himself (in MC or SbJ, I think, or perhaps AoM), and his decisive distinction between "unselfishness" and Christian love.

Bad science in an old SF novel does not bother me - for example in Brave New World the "science" of the hatcheries has a certain retro charm for me. What does annoy me is modern SF using old science because the writer is lazy - for example in the new Dr Who series the villains are still injecting experimental subject with "modified DNA". Come on! What about stem cells, synthetic viruses or RNAi?

I think the only people who are bothered by the less than perfect science are people who don't get the meaning of "Science Fiction". The science of the Cosmic Trilogy was no worse for the 1930's than the science of Star Wars is for today. It was no worse than the science of Star Trek TOS was for the 1960's.

Not too long ago I read through a rather large volume entitled "The Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke". In the introduction, Clarke himself refers to Lewis as an "excellent writer of both fantasy and science fiction." If the science wasn't bad enough to bother Arthur C. Clarke, it's not bad enough to bother me!

Also, with all due respect to Clarke, who was an excellent writer by almost any standard, he was, at least in his later days, just downright hostile to religion of any sort. For Clarke to view works with such obvious religious overtones as Perelandra and OTSP as "Excellent science fiction" really demonstrates just how good they are. Or maybe, in Clarke's mind, the religious elements were just as much a part of the fiction as was Merlin's involvement.

Correct!

With regard to your last question, not the faintest idea

Bill