It was something much more than the pliancy of the heather-like vegetation, and felt more as if the whole floating island beneath that vegetation were a kind of mattress. Then he rolled round on his back, and in doing so discovered the extreme resilience of the surface on which he lay. Burrowing idly with his fingers he found something friable like dry soil, but very little of it, for almost at once he came upon a base of tough interlocked fibres. His first discovery was that he lay on a dry surface, which on examination turned out to consist of something very like heather, except for the colour which was coppery. When he next began to take any notice of his surroundings he was, at all events, well rested.
In Chapter 3 of Perelandra, when Elwin Ransom first arrives on Venus, there are some wonderful descriptive passages, which go far, far beyond Stapledon’s bald statement: “ It seems that he must have remained lying on his face, doing nothing and thinking nothing for a very long time. I would have thought that you constructed Perelandra for the didactic purpose,” Lewis replies “ Yes, everyone thinks that. This is because, as you know, having got your people to this exciting country, something must happen.” When Aldiss responds “ But I am surprised that you put it this way round. And then, of course, the story about an averted fall developed. The whole of the rest of my labors in a sense consisted of building up a world in which floating islands could exist.
However, in a 1962 discussion with Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss, Lewis states that “ The starting point of the second novel, Perelandra, was my mental picture of the floating islands. While Out of the Silent Planet is science fiction, Perelandra is better described as religious fantasy (with portions of what could be called supernatural horror). Lewis, I should also mention Perelandra, the middle volume.
Having blogged about Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength, the first and last novels of the “Space Trilogy” or “Cosmic Trilogy” by C.
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