Weekly “what are you reading” Thread #31

Just read "Out of the Silent Planet" by CS Lewis. Short and sweet, a fun depiction of an alien planet and the several strange species that live there. The linguist protagonist slowly becomes open to the people and ideas of this new world, while the two antagonists are stuck seeing things in a very human frame. Some of the last few chapters had me laughing out loud and tearing up just a few pages apart. Still, Lewis can never really escape religious allegory, and he's a bit of an agendaposter.

OotSP made an interesting pairing with the Three Body trilogy I just finished. For starters, both OotSP and "Death's End" feature a realization that the natural state of the world as we see it is actually an extremely decayed state brought on by intelligent beings in distant prehistory. Both authors handled this well and made it seem believable based on our own observations of the world. Really makes you despair--but there's still a sense of awe at the lost things of the past.

Another connection: "The Dark Forest" and "Death's End" have a major fixation on how humanity must survive in the long-long-term, how humanity must change, untether itself from Earth, what moral principles have to be discarded in space, etc. Then Lewis basically speedruns all the same themes in his last few chapters, comes to the opposite conclusion, and btfos another author who wouldn't be born for decades. It made me realize how some sci-fi and futurist trends are older than we tend to think, and seemingly dated early sci-fi may still engage with conversations that seem newer. In retrospect it's obvious that a Machiavellian view of the far future of humanity would have seemed more natural, or even noble, when the old colonial empires still existed and eugenics was celebrated by the intelligentsia. Maybe Liu is right that ruthless interstellar realpolitik is necessary for a species to survive the Dark Forest for millions of years. But Lewis questions why we should even care about doing this.