The Scientists Take Over: George Orwell Reviews “That Hideous Strength” (1945)
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It's an interesting work. It's flawed, as Orwell notes, but it stands at the crossroads between the prewar and postwar worlds, at the very beginning, perhaps, of what we would recognize as Modernity. To the best of my knowledge, it is the last work of pre-atomic sci-fi. The work itself is as transitional as the time period.
In more concrete terms, it provides a frame on the notion of Progress, and how easily Progress (and those in charge of calling their work Progress) can turn a blind eye to the merits of what is being replaced, with contemptuous disdain for those it leaves behind. (Today we may be more likely to call this sort of thing "Disruption," and while there are real differences in the dynamic, there are similarities too.)
Finally, there's just one small piece of very good advice I extracted from an incidental note in the first chapter — if you write a letter to a committee of some sort, complaining, it will be much stronger and go over better if you limit yourself to a single complaint.
Incidentally the trilogy came about when C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien agreed to write separate sci-fi series - Lewis would write a space trilogy and Tolkien a time-travel one [0]. Tolkien was to write of a traveler from England who visited Numenor (the land of Aragorn's sires) before it drowned in a fate similar to Atlantis. Lewis completed his, but Tolkien did not although much of the material was published in a volume on the history of Middle Earth by his son, Christopher. (Lewis referred to his friend as "that great but dilatory and unmethodical man".) Tolkien's experiment did result in the development of the idea of the Fall of Numenor which did get incorporated into the Lord of the Rings saga.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Road_and_Other_Writ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_(Lewis_novel)
This unfinished book was dropped in favor of "Perelandra", which I think was a good choice.
Numenor was briefly mentioned in "That Hideous Strength".
In Brazil the first two books were translated to Portuguese but, as far as I know, "Strength" never was. That was probably also a good choice as the more familiar you are with British culture the easier it is to like that book. Even for me it is my least favorite and given that I had a computer project named "Merlin" when I read it I expected to enjoy it more.
I love this statement. It seems quite obvious to me, as it did to him, that out of a planet of billions of people, some of those would be power hungry and organize themselves together for better carrying out their schemes. The rest of us should be vigilant in preventing them from rising in power, since they usually have little empathy for the rest of us.
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
I find all of Lewis's works somewhat frustrating to read because I think such an obviously skilled writer should have been able to do better. Both Orwell's complaint (willingness to compromise the story for ideological ends) and Haldane's (attacks on a straw-man version of science as a result of ignorance of the real thing) are IMO correct. That said, Lewis's prose is top-notch and many of the individual scenes are great. That Hideous Strength is the best of the Space Trilogy because by that point Lewis has mostly dropped the pretense that he's writing scifi. The first two feel derivative of better scifi writers (Lewis acknowledges H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, and I suspect David Lindsay is also an influence), whereas the last is closer to his Narnia series (although aimed at an older audience).
Wells was great, though.. both readable and imaginative. I hesitate to mention him and Lewis in the same breath, as I find absolutely nothing redeeming about Lewis' writing either, unless you like your conservative Christian propaganda laid on extra thick.
This is a no-true-Scotsman and there has been substantial scholarship of this practice as part of scientific endeavor at least since Khun’s Structure of Scientific Revolution. As Orwell notes, science had just obliterated 300,000 people quick as a flash...and so it goes. Musk tweeting a topless wired monkey head, Bezos scaling mechanical Turks, and Thiel openly seeking immortality. Silicon Valley funding transfusion of young people’s blood into the old, Crispr edited babies, and even the Tuskegee Experiment back in Lewis’s day.
Science is a human endeavor with all the vileness (and magnificence) that entails.
So it’s entirely reasonable to consider whether “science” - which I think here is really standing in for a certain kind of technological mindset - weighed in the balance, would be found wanting, whether there is not a better way of approaching the world and the things in it, including ourselves, rather than considering everything in it a sort of Heideggerian standing reserve.
This seems particularly true as we advance rather thoughtlessly toward the development of things like AI and genetic engineering.
That pretty much misses the character of human experience as humans experience it. There’s no mereness of tools in the fabric of our psychological existence. In particular abstractions on the scale of science in our conscious processes.
The “just” is how we rationalize removing half a chimp skull to sell electric cars. It’s how we excuse the inexcusable as ordinary.
It's "just" a tool because it is not good or bad by itself, and does not even favor good or bad employment.
If you have a problem with a bad use of science, then you have a problem with a bad user of science.
By contrast, it's not like saying some deadly poison is "just a chemical" that might possibly have one or two possibly good uses but is otherwise entirely a bad thing that we could all live without if it were erased from the world.
Science is nothing but codified rationality.
There is no possible way to twist irrationality into being prefferable to rationality. And so there is no slightest trace of a valid argument that science is a problem that should be disfavored.
Yes it is in fact "just" a tool.
The human experience doesn't change this at all.
You don't need science to rationalize removing the top half of a chimpanzee skull. People who will do a thing, will do a thing with any tool. Science, religion, politics, "think of the children", plain might, anything.
Judging an abstract notion by specific incidents seems to me to be both profoundly human and profoundly wrong.
But in my recollection, the NICE organization exercises a lot of their influence through carefully placed and worded articles and editorials in newspapers and magazines. They are manipulating public perception to extend their power.
Which makes me think of “fake news” and intelligence agencies running influence campaigns through social media. Lewis’ villains I think are less meant to be “true scientists” than experts in politics and disinformation campaigns.
The propaganda portrayal was disturbing. NICE is shown writing populist dreck for the equivalent of the Mail, and at the same time, publishing densely worded scholarly essays, to achieve the same manipulation in different groups of people. It is remarked on that the readers of the intelligent publications are further manipulated into liking the material aimed at them by the existence of the populist material, as they are eager to demonstrate their intellectual superiority by reading credulously publications they seem superior.
Lewis would have rejected the sentiment of that last sentence. For him, all of human history is part of the drama of God vs the devil. And although there has been supernatural at points in the struggle, still what humans did still mattered.
For him, a large part of the struggle is humans surrendering themselves to be used as the vessel for God’s plan.
In some sense, Merlin is a type of Mary who opens himself up to be the human body that the supernatural will inhabit, even though he knows it can ultimately destroy his body.
As an aside, this is one of my favorite books, and I would love to see it made into a movie.
You see it all the time in media - there are demons to fight, and humans fight them. Buffy, Supernatural, etc etc. The "we are god" trope is fascinatingly watchable.
So I have to disagree with Orwell that the supernatural is superfluous. It's more that (each book focusing on a different planet), science is the vehicle for human moral corruption to play out on Earth.
Orwell obviously didn't find anything worthwhile in that, but I think it's more of a matter of Orwell not finding the theme compelling rather than a problem with how the book is put together.
But the review is from just a week after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, so Orwell is referring to wartime fiction rather than postwar fiction.
If you don't already agree with his conservative, Christian point of view, it can make for frustrating reading.
Apart from this, nothing notable springs to mind about this book.
There are far, far better ways to spend your reading hours.
That's the moment when, suddenly, 1) the antagonist molests a child or rapes a woman, and is killed with glee, or 2) the hero gets the upper hand on the antagonist but decides morally and bravely not to kill them, then turns their back on the antagonist for no reason; the ungrateful antagonist immediately takes the opportunity to dishonorably kill the hero from behind, but is killed by a sidekick, secondary character, or act of God in the nick of time, leaving the hero pure.
Could start that way. I think it's Thomas Covenant that works like this? An interesting contrast to the point, perhaps.
To boot, his use of allegory on Perelandra was just hideous. If you're going to make an allegory, you don't have a character explain the allegory while it's in progress!
(On the other hand, if that's literally all you took away from reading it, then you missed all of the parts which Orwell found engaging and which he ran with in _1984_.)
All this has happened before and all this will happen again.
> asserting that it is not only by our own strength or insight [but by the intervention of a purportedly-benevolent supernatural being that totally isn't (barely-trying-to-be-)secrect-ly evil, we promise!] can the evil things we see around us be overcome.
The fact that it's a blatantly obvious lie is precisely why that aspect is bad. And the fact that it's crucial to the books is precisely the problem.
“In his efforts to thwart the council, Syme eventually discovers that five of the other six members are also undercover detectives; each was employed just as mysteriously and assigned to defeat the Council. They soon find out they were fighting each other and not real anarchists; such was the mastermind plan of their president”
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1695/1695-h/1695-h.htm
Sounds like what the war-on-terror eventually ended-up like in Northern Ireland. Eventually virtually every other terrorist of note ended up working for the security forces.
Science is a technique performed by humans to achieve some end. Humans use machines to run mechanical routines called AI to perform tasks in the world.
What are the sources of our results? What are the ends of our chosen uses and efforts?
https://carnegiecouncil-media.storage.googleapis.com/files/v...