30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
So Few Letters, So Much Time, December 30, 2003
This review is from: From Narnia to a Space Odyssey : The War of Ideas Between Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis (Hardcover)
Readers of Lewis would be happy for any book with unpublished CSL letters to see print. After waiting for four years to see this come to publication, as a Lewis scholar, I confess that I am quite dismayed at how actually few are the number of letters available. This is not the editor's fault; but the promotional material--maybe: for it promises a "war" and what we find is really a polite, brief skirmish ended by a formal demurral on Lewis's part--who seems unusually reticent for someone well known for public debate on literary and ethical topics of the kind that Clarke initiates here. Further, only wishful thinking makes it possible to draw the conclusion that "Clarke brought Lewis back to earth," or that there is any specific connection between Narnia and Space Odyssey, as the book's self-description and/or subtitle would imply. One completes the reading knowing only that Lewis and Clarke were congenial and wary; if only there had been a real debate about religion and science, world conquest and quarantined humanity (!)
I agree with John Sherwood's earlier review above that there are a surprising number of typos in this work--quite distracting. One must appreciate the effort it took to bring the project forward, but I think, in order to appreciate Lewis further, one must turn to David Downing's PLANETS IN PERIL and Doris Myers' C S LEWIS IN CONTEXT, for a more thoroughgoing discussion of Lewis's sci-fi milieu.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Some Dialogue!, November 18, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: From Narnia to a Space Odyssey : The War of Ideas Between Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis (Hardcover)
This book is advertised as being "the dialogue of letters between Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis". Well, it turns out that the letters take up a grand total of 17 pages, and there are only 8 letters from Lewis to Clarke: 1 that occupies a full page, 4 that occupy a half page each, and 3 that are 2- or 3-liners. The vast majority of the pages in this slim book are devoted to reprinting short stories and essays available elsewhere. Even the publishers seem to have realized that calling this a "War of Letters" is overblown, because when the book arrived its subtitle had been changed to "The War of Ideas".
When it comes to CSL correspondence collections, I think this should rank dead last on prospective buyers' lists, behind _Collected Letters_ (available from the UK), _Letters of C.S. Lewis_, _Letters to an American Lady_, _The Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis_, _A Severe Mercy_ (by Sheldon Vanauken), and _Letters to Children_.
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22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Worth having -- despite missed opportunities, December 7, 2003
This review is from: From Narnia to a Space Odyssey : The War of Ideas Between Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis (Hardcover)
As the overseer of a fan site devoted to Arthur C. Clarke, at Mysteryvisits, I'm pleased these letters were made available in a published volume, along with commentary of any kind. The editor, Ryder W. Miller, is to be commended for his efforts. It appears that he rescued a failed project and managed to turn it around so it could be completed. For that, we Clarke fans are grateful.
The book has the full support of Sir Arthur, who provides both an introduction and an emailed afterword. Of course, nothing much related to Clarke gets published without his full support, it seems.
The book's physical appearance is an improvement over the recent publication of letters exchanged between Clarke and Lord Dunsany. The new book is a handsome-looking hardback with a nicely printed jacket. And the commentary by Ryder is welcome and occasionally insightful, with reservations mentioned below. The most intriguing of Miller's contentions is that Lewis altered the tone of his "space trilogy" because of Clarke, admitting that he knew little about the science of space travel or its proponents, and rendering the third novel ("That Hideous Strength") entirely earthbound.
Those are the compliments. The drawbacks are fairly apparent, too. For one thing, the premise is slim, in that the correspondence consisted of just 15 letters, many of those from Lewis being brief and obscure. The bones of contention between the two writers were big in concept but limited in exploration. Ultimately, the letters hardly amount to a "war" -- in fact, the letters are uniformly polite, restrained and full of mutual admiration.
There are other drawbacks. The transliterations of Lewis' letters are pretty sad. Lewis often wrote illegibly, and Miller seems to prefer to leave the "translations" illegible, too, rather than take a stab at what words Lewis may have been attempting. As a result, the impression is that Lewis often wrote in gibberish, which one has every reason to know is far from the truth.
And the typos!! Miller's own introduction contains several -- including 'debree' for 'debris' -- and some strained syntax. It appears that, as editor, Miller needed an editor as well.
To flesh out the book, selections of fiction by Clarke and Lewis from the general period of the correspondence (excepting "A Meeting with Medusa," which isn't) are included to form the second part of the book. This might be handy for those who don't own much of the writings of either, but one wonders how many such people would purchase this particular book. Miller suggests this was done to give the reader an idea of the creative thinking of the two men at the time of their correspondence -- and yet some analysis might have been intriguing. Instead, there is none. It's a nice idea left unfulfilled.
Because Lewis gets short shrift from the book in general, and doesn't draw any supportive data from the extensive Lewis academic literature that exists, I imagine the book will end up being of more interest to Clarke fans than to Lewis' admirers. And many of us Clarke "nuts" already were aware of these contacts, including the various Clarke quips about them that occur in his other writings. Thus Clarke's intriguing contact with Lewis probably will remain little-known among Lewis' many admirers. Ah, well! I hope I'm wrong.
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