The Dark Tower (Lewis novel)
The Dark Tower is an incomplete manuscript written by C. S. Lewis that appears to be an unfinished sequel to the science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet, though doubts have been raised about its authenticity.After a while MacPhee, a character who appears in That Hideous Strength (though here he is a Scot, not an Irishman), points out that the "Dark Tower" is in fact a replica of the new Cambridge University Library.The law is stated that "Any two time-lines approximate to the exact degree to which their material contents are alike," and it is revealed that an experiment with a replica railway shed in the right place had already been successful in allowing a controlled transfer of minds.Anne Paxch posted on the MereLewis list[2] that many who never attended any Inklings meetings heard Lewis read his unpublished works elsewhere, and that she recalls Gervase Mathew and others discussing passages which later appeared in The Dark Tower.Lindskoog claimed that The Dark Tower resembled stories by other writers, including A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (1962) and The Planet of the Dead by Clark Ashton Smith (1932).In That Hideous Strength evil magic is at work behind the scenes at an ancient English university in our familiar reality, subtly corrupting the faculty by mundane means – manipulation of academic politics, offers of tempting career advances and of lucrative real estate deals.Another allusion to note is the probable reference of Orfieu to Sir Orfeo, a medieval narrative poem merging the Orpheus myth with the trip to fairyland.In terms of the law that "Any two time-lines approximate to the exact degree to which their material contents are alike" the tower is obviously a repeat, on a grand scale, of the Othertimers' successful but small experiment with a railway shed constructed in the same space as ours.However, although Lewis was a reader of all sorts of science fiction, he himself was not interested in writing the technical side: he wrote in 1955 that "The most superficial appearance of plausibility – the merest sop to our critical intellect – will do.The story could be interpreted as the germ of a dystopian novel like That Hideous Strength: the Stingingmen and Jerkies could parallel the Conditioners and the Conditioned as described in The Abolition of Man.