Rating: 
Summary: A Stew with some choice bits of meat.
Review: All right, there are problems with this book. Lewis' NICE conquers not only England, but the entire world, while the world hardly seems to notice or care. Lewis never has been able to describe any organization that included more than a pub-full of members convincingly. His "international conspiracy" comes off a bit like Spectre without the pirhanhas or pretty girls. He tries McPhee out in the role of house skeptic and house clown, but he doesn't really work in either. And Lewis can't seem to make up his mind if he wants his good guys to practice Christian miracles or pagan magic; where in the Bible do angels possess people? (Comes of hanging around Charles Williams, I guess.)So why do I keep on reading the book? Partly because, like a stew, I can push the ingrediants I don't like to the side. And partly because the book contains some tasty little stylistic and conceptual tidbits, like the proper names, which Lewis fills out with some classic parody, the fun of bringing Merlin back to modern England, and the contrast between the tramp and the magician in the climactic scene. But as Lewis said of Macdonald, the preaching, which would be a defect in other books, is what really saves this one, in my opinion. That Hideous Strength shows a remarkable understanding of the mechanisms of human depravity and redemption. The book is far better on this score than George orwell's antiutopian classic, 1984. Moreover, there are some wonderfully prophetic and insightful passages. The book has, in my opinion, aged extremely well, as technology and the New Age movement have taken the old dream of man as God to new levels in recent years. Was NICE a prophecy of what computer and biotech geniuses are going to do with the human mind in the 21st Century? We'll wait and see.
Rating: 
Summary: A Climatic end to C.S.Lewis's Space Trilogy
Review: 'Out of the Silent Planet' was set on Mars, 'Perelandra' on Venus, so it is almost inevitable that 'That Hideous Strength' is set on Earth. Having journeyed through the Heavens, Ransom is now involved with a group of people, most of them Christians, in dealing with a demonically influenced organisation which has plans to eridicate the human race. Although Ransom is no longer the main character in this story, the others who take centre stage, notably the Studdocks, more than make up for this. The storyline is pacy with the occasional twist, and the characters, whilst some may not be three dimensional, certainly grab your attention. Definetly worth reading
Rating: 
Summary: Complete drek
Review: Don't waste your time on this unmittigatedly boring tripe. If you truly want to have your mind and soul stimulated, read something more challenging, like Glenn Kleier's THE LAST DAY. Now that novel will keep you up biting your nails and hanging on for the stunning conclusion. LAST DAY has substance where STRENGTH has none.
Rating:
Summary: Completely Uninteresting
Review: After reading the first five chapters I was simply too bored to continue. IMHO, a terrible book.
Rating:
Summary: This is the greatest of the Space Trilogy!!!
Review: If you don't have time to read the other two, this one is well worth your time. This book is profound, exciting, fantastic, and intellectually stimulating! If you have read all of Lewis' other works this one will be wonderfully different, but still the great Lewis you know.
Rating:
Summary: A great end to the Space trilogy.
Review: Secular humanists will loathe it, but this is a great book. It was written in 1943, before George Orwell's 1984, but has many of the same themes. The theological landscape may be a little too fantastic for some tastes, but isn't that why they call this genre fantasy?
Rating: 
Summary: For one thing, it¿s not ¿a modern fairy tale for grown-ups¿
Review: I start with a quibble. Lewis's preface states, "If you ask why - intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals, and planetary angels - I nonetheless begin with such hum-drum scenes and persons, I reply that I am following the traditional fairytale. We do not always notice its methods, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters and petty kings with which a fairytale opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories." Lewis demonstrates a basic misunderstanding here, which can be cured by reading a hundred folktales in a row and noting the opening sentences: "Once, in another kingdom, not in this place ..."; "Once upon a time ..."; "Long ago in a galaxy far, far away ..." The air of what we now call social realism is banished with the very first sentence, and the "hum-drum" beginning is a more complex thing than Lewis imagines it to be. But my quibble is more than just a quibble, for it illustrates the basic failure of "That Hideous Strength". Lewis tries to blend the fantastic with the everyday, yes. But he also throws in a sort of creepy science fiction, Christianity, Arthurian legend, dystopia, and several other things besides, and the result is not a blend but a salad. The truth is, none of the books in the Cosmic trilogy quite comes off. The first is a kind of satire of H.G. Wells, which makes a hollow "ping" if you strike it. The second (and best) is a pure fantasy which happens to be set on Venus (just as a fantasy might be set in Ancient Greece or on a deserted island), which preaches just a little too much. And the third ... well, we return to the world of H.G. Wells (with a highly unfair and unflattering caricature of the man himself), but we also have pure Perelandran fantasy, and these two flavours clash all by themselves - never mind what else is in the book. And speaking of caricatures, there is MacPhee, an annoying cardboard portrait of an old tutor of Lewis's, who was himself, as far as I can tell, made of cardboard. (A much rounder portrait in the same vein is the Fox, in Lewis's "Till We Have Faces" - in every way a better book.) HOWEVER ... I liked it. Individual scenes don't work together, but they frequently work. The narrative thread of the endearingly unendearing Mark Studdock is a worthwhile book in itself. It's hard, all said and done, to find a reader who doesn't enjoy this book. The Cosmic trilogy as a whole, however, must be written off as a failed experiment, by a writer who could do much better. In the following decade, he did.
Rating:
Summary: Slow start but finishes strongly
Review: As a fairy tale, this book starts off rather slowly (as many fairy tales do), but the action eventually picks up and the ending is good. Besides the story line, this book presents a more right brained approach to the things Lewis wrote about in THE ABOLITION OF MAN, as well as a depiction of the groups he talks about in his essay "The Inner Ring", the 6th chapter of his book THE WEIGHT OF GLORY. Lewis manages bring in several other mythologies into his own story, including Numinor (from his friend J.R.R. Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS) and Merlin (from the Arthurian saga). If you can patiently work your way through the start of this novel, the body and ending of it will reward your efforts.
Rating:
Summary: This book is both an Adventure and a Sacrament!
Review: Lewis' book is the modern story of *sacred England*, which is, apparently, called "Logres"..of the legacy of King Arthur, in Service to the Christ-Consciousness.(And every nation, he tells us, has its "sacred" and "profane" traditions, and its own Story.) Lewis "wakes up" Merlin the Magician and brings him into the 20th century, and enables the reader to accept, as well as know, him. And the same is true for the novelist's wonderful characterization of a *bear* who plays a very big part in the story. And many other beautifully drawn human ("all TOO human", in some cases) characters. This book is one of the greatest visionary novels I have ever read (or, in this case, listened to on tape.) The last cassette is almost inexpressively, *impossibly* beautiful. It expresses a vision of Harmony among all the Kingdoms of Evolution, and a Harmony of a Sacred Chain of Being that leads through all these Kingdoms and Beyond, into realms one might call "the realms of the gods", of "Cosmic Astrology" with the planets as living beings, all within One Living God. Hearing it is in a way an entering of Paradise. A Sacrament. I thought I would select a few passages to share: from the 11th cassette: "She comes more near the Earth than she was wont to, to make Earth sane. Peralandra (note: the goddess Venus) is all about us, and Man is no longer isolated. We are now as we ought to be: between the angels, who are our elder brothers, and the beasts, who are our jesters, servants, and playfellows." from the 9th cassette: In this heighth, and depth, and breadth, the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called "me", dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in space, without air. The name "me" was the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected: a being that! did not yet fully exist, but whose existence was demanded. It was a person--not the person she had thought--yet also a thing: a *made* thing. Made to please Another, and in Him, to please all others..a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of. from the 11th: "Go, in obedience, and you will find love." ps: I just found the tapes to OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, the *1st* volume of this trilogy. _______
Rating:
Summary: Excellent! Will be read for centuries to come!
Review: This book is a must read for all C.S. Lewis fans, or even fiction or sci-fi fans. Lewis does a better job of potraying a battle of angels and devils then Frank Paretti did in This Present Darkness. This book lets the reader see the eternal conflict between good and evil. Satan and God. Lewis does a remarkable job in this extraordinary book! For all Christians (and sci-fi or fiction fans), this is a must read!!
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