Out of the Silent Planet

This afternoon I finished the 6th book by CS Lewis of the summer (9th book overall). It was the first book in his space trilogy "Out of the Silent Planet".

I will admit, I approached this book with a fair amount of apprehension, and with a suspicion that I wasn't really going to like it. I'm hardly what one would call a fan of science fiction. All the remarks I've heard about the trilogy before could be basically summed up in one statement : you'll either love it or hate it.

I decidedly fall somewhere in between. It is not one of my most favorite works of Lewis - it ranks close to the bottom. I didn't really start to enjoy it until about halfway through the book. When Ransom finally encounters some other...beings, I'll call them...that's when I finally became interested. I don't really like it when an author spends a great deal of time on details, and when you're attempting to describe a different world to a reader, you end up spending about the first half of the work focusing on detail about the surroundings. The character development, intertwined with loosely veiled Biblical allusions towards the end, was what really caught my attention. I have always been amazed at Lewis' talent to seamlessly blend Biblical truths with fiction or mythology, yet not in such a way as to be called blasphemous. If you can make it to the end of the story, I would say that Lewis proves his ability in that area in "Out of the Silent Planet" even better than he did in "The Chronicles of Narnia".