{"id":10103,"date":"2026-01-09T00:03:53","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T06:03:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/?p=10103"},"modified":"2026-01-05T18:04:51","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T00:04:51","slug":"hall-of-fame-finalist-review-c-s-lewiss-that-hideous-strength-dramatizes-his-metaphysical-vision-of-warring-ideologies-of-good-and-evil-freedom-and-tyranny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/hall-of-fame-finalist-review-c-s-lewiss-that-hideous-strength-dramatizes-his-metaphysical-vision-of-warring-ideologies-of-good-and-evil-freedom-and-tyranny\/","title":{"rendered":"Hall of Fame Finalist Review: C.S. Lewis\u2019s That Hideous Strength dramatizes warring ideologies of good and evil, freedom and tyranny"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Michael Grossberg<\/a><\/p>\n

Bestselling British author C.S. Lewis wrote more than 30 books of fiction and non-fiction. With estimated sales approaching 200 million copies in print, Lewis (1898-1963) is best-known for his children\u2019s fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia <\/i>and his devilish epistolary novel The Screwtape Letters.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Lewis also wrote science fiction – most notably, his Space Trilogy, which culminates with That Hideous Strength, <\/i>Lewis\u2019 most libertarian novel.<\/p>\n

Selected by LFS judges as one of this year\u2019s Prometheus Hall of Fame finalists for Best Classic Fiction, That Hideous Strength <\/i>offers a dystopian and metaphysical vision that dramatizes warring ideologies of good and evil, freedom and tyranny.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Each novel in the Space trilogy (also known as the Ransom trilogy) is set on a different planet with Book One, Out of the Silent Planet, <\/i>taking place on Mars; and Book Two, Perelandra, <\/i>on Venus.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A CAUTIONARY TALE, MYSTERY AND ARTHURIAN FANTASY
\n<\/b>
\nSet on Earth, That Hideous Strength <\/i>works as both a cautionary tale and a mystery as hidden powers scheme to enslave humanity.<\/p>\n

Initially focused on the academic politics of a musty college in mid-20th-century England but expanding into Arthurian fantasy, Satanic conspiracies and cosmic\/theological themes, the story exposes layer after layer of diabolical deception as double-talking, self-seeking professors and corrupt bureaucrats promote a rising progressive-left ideology that seeks absolute power.<\/p>\n

As LFS President William H. Stoddard, who chairs the Prometheus Hall of Fame judging committee, has observed, Lewis \u201cdoes an excellent job of showing how the shift from law, which viewed people as acting subjects, to planning, which views them as acted-upon objects, destroys the rationale for a free society \u2014 and ultimately destroys the very planners themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cambridge philologist Elwin Ransom, the main character in the previous novels in the trilogy, continues as a major character in the third. Also known as the Pedestrian, Ransom directs an organization resisting the demonic takeover of the world. A mentor to others, Ransom ultimately becomes a saint-like Prophet.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A HUSBAND AND WIFE, DIVIDED IN BATTLE<\/b><\/p>\n

At the center of the novel are Jane and Mark Studdock, stuck in a relatively new and loveless marriage. Mark, a sociologist, and Jane, an aspiring literary scholar, become enmeshed with a powerful but mysterious organization known as N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Coordinated Experiments) that aims to establish a major new facility on campus.<\/p>\n

Jane, who\u2019s given up writing her PhD. paper on John Donne to become a dissatisfied housewife, begins to question her own sanity after having a series of dreams about the severed head of a scientist, Alcasan.<\/p>\n

Mark, meanwhile, is an ambitious professor obsessed with reaching the inner circle of his academic caste. Yet his shaky progress in climbing the rungs of N.I.C.E. actually becomes a descent into hell.<\/p>\n

The result is that the husband and wife unexpectedly wind up on opposing sides of a deepening battle between spiritually based Natural Law, reflecting the rhythms and decency of everyday life, and the insidious spirit-denying falsehoods of Logical Positivism (an influential mid-century philosophy that Lewis believed was seriously flawed, with civilization-threatening implications).<\/p>\n

As he\u2019s drawn deeper into the sinister organization, Mark discovers that his wife\u2019s dreams are real when he meets the literal head of Alcasan, kept alive for nefarious purposes by infusions of blood. Animated in a totemic fashion, the head seems symbolic of Lewis\u2019 Christian perspective on the warped idealism of authoritarian progressives who view people as minds without souls.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
C.S. Lewis (Creative Commons license)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A CHAMPION OF LOVE, LIBERTY AND DECENCY
\n<\/b>
\nAs an alternative to such monstrosities, Lewis champions love, marriage and the basic decency of humanity, struggling to live and live up to age-old Christian ideals even amidst the perennial temptations of power, wishful thinking and other age-old human flaws.<\/p>\n

Amidst its dramatic arc of demonic corruption and angelic redemption, Lewis\u2019 novel explores mid-20th-century intellectual and political trends to warn about the dangers of a centrally planned pseudo-scientific and Nazi-like society literally hell-bent on controlling all human life.<\/p>\n

Lewis depicts the people of England under growing threat by abusive instruments of State power, noting “their houses had been taken from them, their livelihood destroyed, and their liberties threatened by the Institutional Police.”<\/p>\n

Published in 1945, and written at the peaks of collectivism in Europe and Russia, That Hideous Strength <\/i>offered a timely warning about the insidious ways that rising totalitarianism of the Left or Right deadens the human spirit and denies reality, liberty and true morality.<\/p>\n

In the foreword to the first edition, Lewis drew explicit parallels between the themes of his novel and The Abolition of Man<\/i>, perhaps his non-fiction book that is most consistently proto-libertarian.<\/p>\n

In both books, Lewis upheld objective values of good and evil and advocated recognition of natural laws and truth as a moral and spiritual bulwark against evil, error, delusion and the subjectivist denial of reality that tends to corrupt human relationships under all dictatorships.<\/p>\n

His foundational Christian and protolibertarian view, only belatedly grasped by one central character: “… that souls and personal responsibility existed.”<\/p>\n

A CRITIQUE OF SCIENTISM AND THE THERAPEUTIC STATE<\/b><\/p>\n

Lewis\u2019 concerns about the early rise of the therapeutic state and his critique of modernism, progressivism, the \u201cstrong man\u201d ideologies of fascism\/socialism and the dangers of scientism (science not as the value-free pursuit of truth, but as an elitist justification for social control) seem prescient today.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
George Orwell (Creative Commons license)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Incorporating many of the same insights that fellow Brit George Orwell would dramatize just three years later in Nineteen Eighty-Four, <\/i>Lewis dramatizes how any form of tyranny – including what Orwell called the \u201csmelly little orthodoxies\u201d of the Left –\u00a0 <\/span>undermine honesty, integrity, decency, morality, objectivity, the pursuit of knowledge and truth itself.<\/p>\n

Especially impressive dramatically is Lewis\u2019 slow uncovering of the layers of evil, many cloaked within evasive academic double-talk and polite euphemism. Such radical subjectivism and outright denialism of objective reality is so pervasive that in response to Mark Studdock\u2019s queries, one yearns for the corrupted academics and bureaucrats to reply just once with an unambiguous \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Stoddard observed, the novel ultimately offers not only an insightful dissection of evil but redeemingly, a powerful statement about love and Charity, which Lewis calls “fiery, sharp, bright and ruthless . . .”<\/p>\n

Reflecting his deep views as perhaps the leading Christian philosopher-artist of the 20th century, the positive alternative Lewis envisions is a reaffirmation of spiritual decency and common humanity as individuals act voluntarily and benevolently towards each other to sustain a community where “all men are brothers (under God).\u201d<\/p>\n

A CLASSIC OF ITS ERA, WITH FLAWS OF ITS ERA
\n<\/b>
\nAlthough Lewis invests the novel with some humor, That Hideous Strength<\/i> is often dry in style and somewhat uneven in writing.<\/p>\n

Sadly, some aspects not only seem dated but have become offensive – especially in the crude stereotyping of its only female villain.<\/p>\n

A butch lesbian nicknamed \u201cThe Fairy,\u201d Miss Hardcastle heads the N.I.C.E. private police force, which engages in police brutality. Lusting after female prisoners and getting sexual pleasure from abusing them, Hardcastle leads a plot to incite riots to pressure the government to grant N.I.C.E. emergency powers. Aren\u2019t her actions evil enough without implying that her very sexuality is inherently corrupt and perverted – prejudiced views common in the 1940s but understood to be false today?<\/p>\n

Even with such defects, the novel remains worth reading.<\/p>\n

Evoking a police state in the takeover of a local village and warning about the dangers of bureaucracy, Lewis seems most prophetic today in his cautions about the therapeutic state and the rising ideology of scientism.<\/p>\n

THE SPIRITUAL WAR AT THE NOVEL\u2019S HEART<\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/b>Towards its conclusion, the novel incorporates increasingly mystical elements, including bringing Merlin himself into the 20th century for a final apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil.<\/p>\n

The context of the spiritual battle in That Hideous Strength<\/i> is set up by the previous novels in the Space Trilogy, as Stoddard noted in his nominating statement. When some people from Earth traveled to Mars, they inadvertently broke the barrier between sublunary and superlunary space, allowing the angels of the other planets to gain access to Earth, whose own angel is fallen and corrupt.<\/p>\n

Even as That Hideous Strength<\/i> provides a satisfying resolution to the Space Trilogy, it works well enough as a stand-alone novel. In some ways, it\u2019s more plausibly and vividly imagined than Out of the Silent Planet <\/i>and Perelandra,<\/i> since Lewis was very familiar with real-world academia and bureaucracy from his years at Oxford.<\/p>\n

WHY LEWIS RANKS WITH OTHER BRITISH DYSTOPIAN AUTHORS<\/b><\/p>\n

With its darker focus on the grim consequences of a growing tyranny and evil on Earth, the novel fits well into the landscape of other British dystopian classics – including such Prometheus Hall of Fame winners as Orwell\u2019s Animal Farm<\/i><\/a> and Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/a> <\/i>and Anthony Burgess\u2019 A Clockwork Orange<\/a>. <\/i>Like these other classics, That Hideous Strength <\/i>warns about the dangers of communism, fascism and national socialism – all the rising statist and collectivist ideologies that were threatening the lives and liberties of millions in Lewis\u2019 mid-20th-century era.<\/p>\n

As reflected in its deus ex machina<\/i> ending, Lewis\u2019 alternative ideal is a religion-inspired community of goodness, love and sacrifice and mutual respect drawing on the norms of basic human decency that have evolved and matured over the centuries.<\/p>\n

As Jessica Hooten Wilson writes insightfully in her essay on \u201cThree Dangerous Philosophical Novels\u201d<\/a> (published in Faith & Culture<\/em>, The Journal of the Augustine Institute), \u201cAgainst what one character calls ‘goodness in the abstract,’ which produces ‘the fatal idea of something standardized\u2014some common kind of life to which all nations ought to progress,’ That Hideous Strength\u00a0<\/i>uplifts the virtue of particular persons enacting grace toward one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prometheus-winning novelists J. Neil Schulman (The Rainbow Cadenza<\/a>) <\/i>and Brad Linaweaver (Moon of Ice),<\/i> huge fans of Lewis\u2019 fiction and non-fiction and sadly now both passed, were greatly influenced by his thinking and considered<\/a> Lewis the greatest Christian libertarian of the 20th century.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Just as The Abolition of Man<\/i> arguably comes closest in Lewis\u2019 nonfiction to making Lewis\u2019 protolibertarian sensibilities explicit a generation or two before the emergence of modern full-fledged libertarianism, That Hideous Strength <\/i>is the fictional work that best makes clear Lewis\u2019 profound love of both liberty and humanity under God.<\/p>\n

FOR FURTHER READING<\/strong><\/p>\n

* See former Prometheus editor Anders Monsen\u2019s column \u201cThe Joyous Surprise of C.S. Lewis\u2019s Mundane SF Novel,\u201d<\/a> which hails That Hideous Strength as \u201ca well-written and nearly timeless work of fiction\u201d and concludes that \u201ccertainly, there are pro-liberty sentiments in the book, or at the very least anti-statist views. Much like the socialists that Friedrich Hayek denounced many times over for their planners’ conceit, we see the same experimental sociology denounced by Lewis, in quite a convincing fashion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

THE PROMETHEUS HALL OF FAME FINALISTS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Along with Lewis’ That Hideous Strength<\/em>, four other works have been selected this year by LFS judges as finalists for the 2026 Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction. Reviews of all finalists have now been published on the Prometheus Blog: The Star Dwellers,<\/em> a 1961 novel by James Blish; Brave New World,<\/em> a 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley; Salt,<\/em> a 2000 novel by Adam Roberts, and Singularity Sky,<\/em> a 2003 novel by Charles Stross.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, capsule descriptions of each finalist are included in the LFS Hall of Fame finalist press release,<\/a> which was announced in full on File 770.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS<\/b><\/p>\n

*\u00a0Join us!<\/b> To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, \u00a0join<\/a> the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer international association of freedom-loving sf\/fantasy fans.<\/p>\n

Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other\u2019s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.<\/p>\n

* Prometheus winners:\u00a0<\/b>For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees \u2013 including in the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards \u2013 visit the enhanced \u00a0Prometheus Awards page<\/a>\u00a0on the LFS website. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards\u2019 distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog\u2019s\u00a0Video page.<\/a><\/p>\n

* Read \u201cThe Libertarian History of Science Fiction,\u201d<\/a> an essay in the international magazine\u00a0Quillette<\/i>\u00a0that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf\/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.<\/p>\n