As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit. The flat heath which spread out before me (for the village lies all behind and to the north of the station) looked an ordinary heath. The gloomy five-o'clock sky was such as you might see on any autumn afternoon. The few houses and the clumps of red or yellowish trees were in no way remarkable. Who could imagine that a little farther on in that quiet landscape I should meet and shake by the hand a man who had lived and eaten and drunk in a world forty million miles distant from London, who had seen this Earth from where it looks like a mere point of green fire, and who had spoken face to face with a creature whose life began before our own planet was inhabitable?
For Ransom had met other things in Mars besides the Martians. He had met the creatures called eldila, and specially the great eldil who is the ruler of Mars, or, in their speech, the Oyarsa of Malacandra. The eldila are very different from any planetary creatures. Their physical organism, if organism it can be called, is quite unlike either the human or the Martian. They do not eat, breed, breathe, or suffer natural death, and to that extent resemble thinking minerals more than they resemble anything we should recognize as an animal. Though they appear on planets and may even seem to our senses to be sometimes resident on them, the precise spatial location of an eldil at any moment presents great problems. They themselves regard space (or "Deep Heaven") as their true habitat, and the planets are to them not closed worlds but merely moving points---perhaps even interruptions---in what we know as the Solar System and they as the Field of Arbol.
Book title: Perelandra
Author: C. S. Lewis
Author's faith: Anglican
Genre: Science Fiction
Subgenre: Planetary Travel Science Fiction
Story tags: inhabited Venus, Adam and Eve, Fall of Man
Publication Date: 1944
Buy at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Perelandra-Cosmic-Trilogy-C-Lewis/dp/0007157169
No comments:
Post a Comment