Into the Wardrobe

Perelandra!

I agree that the last few pages are a bit heady and I don't read them closely. (I've also never liked reading Revelations. )

Perelandra was a very significant part of my return to faith. It's a fantastic way to convince an intellectual skeptic that evil is a real and active presence in our cosmos. From that premise, it's not such a far leap to the idea that good may also be a real and active presence.

As I have mentioned in several other postings over the years - Perelandra is the best of Lewis' Space Trilogy. I know that Stanley Anderson disagrees with me on this. But here is my humble opinion about the second installment of the trilogy:

I loved Out of the Silent Planet as a classic early 20th Century pulp style science fiction novel. It was only years later when I wrote a study on it that I realized how deep it was. I thought it should have been longer. Yet now that I think of it, the first volume of the trilogy appears to be an introduction for the next volume, Perelandra.
Perelandra is the jewel in the center of this work. Just as OOTSP told the story of what happened before The Fall of our planet, Perelandra tells about the first parents of the planet Venus passing the test our Adam and Eve failed, with a little help from Prof. Ransom.
Lewis then completed the trilogy by taking the action back to planet Earth, or Thulcandra as he called it in That Hideous Strength. He tries tying up all the loose ends suggested by the previous two works. IMHO, this third volume could have been shorter. And yet I must admit that Lewis was justified in putting all his ideas about where our modern society is going by cramming it into this one novel. I find it more interesting than the non-fiction version of this story in his book The Abolition of Man. Though I enjoyed his examples of "The Tao" in the back of that book.