I found the conclusion to THS unsatisfying too, and for the same reasons. It almost felt like Lewis was saying that he couldn't really see a plausible means of fighting back against the macrobes and their human cultists' deft cognitive infiltration of global society, so in the end he just threw his hands up, took off, and nuked it from orbit.
Not that I'm against a good thaumaturgical nuking, mind you; I just wish his protagonists had done more than hang out in stately manor homes.
I suspect part of the problem was in his choice of characters. They're all academics, Ransom included, or just regular folks. Hobbits, in other words. You can have hobbits as protagonists, but if you want to push the story forward you need some warriors, too. THS needed an Aragorn, a Legolas, and a Gimli. Had the cast included, say, a former paratrooper, the presence of a man of action would have provided the necessary raw material for a daring commando raid to accompany Merlin's final mission. As it was, the plot felt very static, for the unavoidable reason that none of the characters were particularly kinetic. Basically Lewis goofed in his casting, and then wrote himself into a corner.
What is kind of confusing to me is that a good Christian, practically THE Good Christian, couldn't come up with a good role for support characters. I mean that in the sense of characters whose job is something other than cracking skulls. Charity missions to find people dispossessed, warning people, getting evidence or resources in ways that muscle can't solve, etc. I know it was the days before D&D so the 5 man band idea of everyone having something to do might not have been as obvious, but Tolkien is full of examples of non-combat oriented characters being really important and doing things. Even if it is just walking a lot, it is walking through danger and there are stakes to not succeeding in that walk.
Plus, Lewis does have at least two characters who could stand up and crack some heads. MacPhee comes across as a brave and vigorous type, and Arthur Denniston is... well kind of a blank other than being husband to his wife, and could easily be a sufficiently strapping fellow for a little moderate action.
Hell, you liken the main cast to hobbits, but hobbits kick some ass now and again! Merry and Pippin are involved in multiple battles, including the gang bang of the Witch King of Angmar, Sam takes out a few orcs in a fit of rage, even Bilbo takes on giant spiders. Tolkien definitely did not discount the average clerk or academic's ability and duty to fight when necessary, possibly because of his experiences in WW1. It is kind of jarring to see Lewis just leave them by the wayside.
Now, admittedly, I am dinging Lewis points for not being perfect, and that is a little unfair, but these sorts of things seem well within his capacity. I kind of wonder what Tolkien thought about the matter, since they were definitely talking over drinks about the story.
It's especially surprising given that Lewis proved his ability to write high adventure in a Christian context with the Narnia series. Then again, this could be his development as a writer: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was published in 1950, 5 years after That Hideous Strength. It may well be that he realized his misstep, and learned from the experience.
Regarding 1984 depicting a civilization in decline, I quite agree.
It would be interesting to revisit that world a century hence, in 1984. Newspeak would have totally destroyed the ability of the Party to maintain a technological civilization. Party-controlled areas have shrunken from globe-spanning empires to small, crumbling cores around central urban areas. The population has died back. The military can no longer manufacture rifles or even ammunition.
Meanwhile, in the hinterlands of the North American plains and the Eurasian steppe, horse tribes formed from escaped proles are beginning to carve new empires out of the rotting corpses of the Party's dominions.
That would be cool! I can think of two interesting angles there:
1: From within the Party states as internal rebels and rising "3rd world" nations start to tear apart the empires. You could do a really interesting contrast between the more "civilized" Party state remnants and the "savage" but really just differently civilized rising powers. Come to think of it, I wonder if that is what the Hunger Games author was kind of trying to do, perhaps unconsciously?
2: Write entirely from the point of view of those on the outside. It would be an almost post apocalyptic setting, as those caught in the middle of the wars of the big 3 come to realize they are not coming back and start to occupy the bombed out factories and infrastructure. Start it up a few generations down the road and they don't even really need to know who their former masters were, just the foreign devils who blew things up and disappeared. They can even start to raid the strange people live in mighty cities but can't seem to do anything themselves. Then you have the big reveal that it is the corpse of Oceania they are picking over, ala a Planet of the Apes style reveal of someone finding the Ministry of Truth building.
I think you might be right about the Hunger Games.
2) would definitely be the way to go in my opinion. What would make it an interesting contrast is that the feel of such a story - barbarian warriors chewing their way into the corpse of a collapsing empire - would have more in common with heroic fantasy than the nihilistic modernism of the original.
As an aside, Tom Kratman's Carrera series features something like this. Most of the story takes place off planet, but on the Earth he depicts several centuries in the future, in which UN/NGO/WEF liberalism has triumphed, civilization is pulling back due to the inability of the parasite class to maintain an industrial base, and as a result barbarian horse tribes are starting to carve out chunks of their empire in the abandoned hinterlands.
Oooh, an interesting angle for 2 just popped up. The barbarians are chewing into the old empire because they think "The people that live in those massive structures with their amazing technology must be as happy gods!" only to discover how sad and depressing their world is, and how even the powerful are really no better off than the barbarians. The barbarians discover that all the splendor they saw was made by men hundreds of years before, and the current Oceanians can barely maintain it much less create it anew. The starry eyed among the barbarians hoped to learn new ways to mold their civilization, and instead find only self mutilation and rot.
Kind of a nice parallel to how the modern left can't seem to build institutions, but just takes over, hollows out and eventually destroys the institutions of old.
Maybe ... I'm not sure the Mongols had many illusions about the virtues of civilization, though; and the Germanic tribes certainly seem to have viewed the Imperials with more than a little contempt.
The other thing is that, realistically, Oceania contains nothing at all of beauty or grace with which to bewitch the savage eye. Further, the barbarians would have been in contact with the Oceanians for some time, both as the subject of their military attentions, and probably via defections from proles and disaffected Outer Party members.
Then again, we don't know how the Party presents itself to the outside world. They're masters of propaganda after all. It could be that they recognize the value of fostering an external impression that Oceania is a land of peace, plenty, power, and beauty, in order to keep the savages appropriately reverential and awestruck. Such a propaganda campaign could become even more important as the actual ability of the Party to maintain its military defenses was crumbling.
Well I think the Germanic tribes knew the Romans were wealthy, and whether or not they cared for civilization they wanted that. The big surprise would be "Damn, these people are worse off than we are! How's that happen?"
Have you ever read Bernard Cornwall's viking series? (The first book is The Last Kingdom, made into a show with the same name.) There is a theme running through it that the English/Danes hold the Romans in awe, because their giant stone building are still extant and lived in, but no one living knows how they were made. That would be interesting to mirror, only with the realization that the Oceanians can't make them, either.
I think the way to do it would be to set it enough in the future that the Party's power is largely forgotten, and those who started outside (those living in the buffer zones in 1984) no longer have living memory of when the big empires mattered. They would retain a dim cultural mythology of the days when outsiders would conquer them and force them to work in factories etc., only to be conquered and enslaved by someone else, but no real sense of what they were like anymore. Then they discover that their previous overlords are really just tawdry, craven slaves themselves.
I found the conclusion to THS unsatisfying too, and for the same reasons. It almost felt like Lewis was saying that he couldn't really see a plausible means of fighting back against the macrobes and their human cultists' deft cognitive infiltration of global society, so in the end he just threw his hands up, took off, and nuked it from orbit.
Not that I'm against a good thaumaturgical nuking, mind you; I just wish his protagonists had done more than hang out in stately manor homes.
I suspect part of the problem was in his choice of characters. They're all academics, Ransom included, or just regular folks. Hobbits, in other words. You can have hobbits as protagonists, but if you want to push the story forward you need some warriors, too. THS needed an Aragorn, a Legolas, and a Gimli. Had the cast included, say, a former paratrooper, the presence of a man of action would have provided the necessary raw material for a daring commando raid to accompany Merlin's final mission. As it was, the plot felt very static, for the unavoidable reason that none of the characters were particularly kinetic. Basically Lewis goofed in his casting, and then wrote himself into a corner.
Yes, right!?
What is kind of confusing to me is that a good Christian, practically THE Good Christian, couldn't come up with a good role for support characters. I mean that in the sense of characters whose job is something other than cracking skulls. Charity missions to find people dispossessed, warning people, getting evidence or resources in ways that muscle can't solve, etc. I know it was the days before D&D so the 5 man band idea of everyone having something to do might not have been as obvious, but Tolkien is full of examples of non-combat oriented characters being really important and doing things. Even if it is just walking a lot, it is walking through danger and there are stakes to not succeeding in that walk.
Plus, Lewis does have at least two characters who could stand up and crack some heads. MacPhee comes across as a brave and vigorous type, and Arthur Denniston is... well kind of a blank other than being husband to his wife, and could easily be a sufficiently strapping fellow for a little moderate action.
Hell, you liken the main cast to hobbits, but hobbits kick some ass now and again! Merry and Pippin are involved in multiple battles, including the gang bang of the Witch King of Angmar, Sam takes out a few orcs in a fit of rage, even Bilbo takes on giant spiders. Tolkien definitely did not discount the average clerk or academic's ability and duty to fight when necessary, possibly because of his experiences in WW1. It is kind of jarring to see Lewis just leave them by the wayside.
Now, admittedly, I am dinging Lewis points for not being perfect, and that is a little unfair, but these sorts of things seem well within his capacity. I kind of wonder what Tolkien thought about the matter, since they were definitely talking over drinks about the story.
It's especially surprising given that Lewis proved his ability to write high adventure in a Christian context with the Narnia series. Then again, this could be his development as a writer: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was published in 1950, 5 years after That Hideous Strength. It may well be that he realized his misstep, and learned from the experience.
Regarding 1984 depicting a civilization in decline, I quite agree.
It would be interesting to revisit that world a century hence, in 1984. Newspeak would have totally destroyed the ability of the Party to maintain a technological civilization. Party-controlled areas have shrunken from globe-spanning empires to small, crumbling cores around central urban areas. The population has died back. The military can no longer manufacture rifles or even ammunition.
Meanwhile, in the hinterlands of the North American plains and the Eurasian steppe, horse tribes formed from escaped proles are beginning to carve new empires out of the rotting corpses of the Party's dominions.
That would be cool! I can think of two interesting angles there:
1: From within the Party states as internal rebels and rising "3rd world" nations start to tear apart the empires. You could do a really interesting contrast between the more "civilized" Party state remnants and the "savage" but really just differently civilized rising powers. Come to think of it, I wonder if that is what the Hunger Games author was kind of trying to do, perhaps unconsciously?
2: Write entirely from the point of view of those on the outside. It would be an almost post apocalyptic setting, as those caught in the middle of the wars of the big 3 come to realize they are not coming back and start to occupy the bombed out factories and infrastructure. Start it up a few generations down the road and they don't even really need to know who their former masters were, just the foreign devils who blew things up and disappeared. They can even start to raid the strange people live in mighty cities but can't seem to do anything themselves. Then you have the big reveal that it is the corpse of Oceania they are picking over, ala a Planet of the Apes style reveal of someone finding the Ministry of Truth building.
I think you might be right about the Hunger Games.
2) would definitely be the way to go in my opinion. What would make it an interesting contrast is that the feel of such a story - barbarian warriors chewing their way into the corpse of a collapsing empire - would have more in common with heroic fantasy than the nihilistic modernism of the original.
As an aside, Tom Kratman's Carrera series features something like this. Most of the story takes place off planet, but on the Earth he depicts several centuries in the future, in which UN/NGO/WEF liberalism has triumphed, civilization is pulling back due to the inability of the parasite class to maintain an industrial base, and as a result barbarian horse tribes are starting to carve out chunks of their empire in the abandoned hinterlands.
Oooh, an interesting angle for 2 just popped up. The barbarians are chewing into the old empire because they think "The people that live in those massive structures with their amazing technology must be as happy gods!" only to discover how sad and depressing their world is, and how even the powerful are really no better off than the barbarians. The barbarians discover that all the splendor they saw was made by men hundreds of years before, and the current Oceanians can barely maintain it much less create it anew. The starry eyed among the barbarians hoped to learn new ways to mold their civilization, and instead find only self mutilation and rot.
Kind of a nice parallel to how the modern left can't seem to build institutions, but just takes over, hollows out and eventually destroys the institutions of old.
So want to write a book? :D
Maybe ... I'm not sure the Mongols had many illusions about the virtues of civilization, though; and the Germanic tribes certainly seem to have viewed the Imperials with more than a little contempt.
The other thing is that, realistically, Oceania contains nothing at all of beauty or grace with which to bewitch the savage eye. Further, the barbarians would have been in contact with the Oceanians for some time, both as the subject of their military attentions, and probably via defections from proles and disaffected Outer Party members.
Then again, we don't know how the Party presents itself to the outside world. They're masters of propaganda after all. It could be that they recognize the value of fostering an external impression that Oceania is a land of peace, plenty, power, and beauty, in order to keep the savages appropriately reverential and awestruck. Such a propaganda campaign could become even more important as the actual ability of the Party to maintain its military defenses was crumbling.
Well I think the Germanic tribes knew the Romans were wealthy, and whether or not they cared for civilization they wanted that. The big surprise would be "Damn, these people are worse off than we are! How's that happen?"
Have you ever read Bernard Cornwall's viking series? (The first book is The Last Kingdom, made into a show with the same name.) There is a theme running through it that the English/Danes hold the Romans in awe, because their giant stone building are still extant and lived in, but no one living knows how they were made. That would be interesting to mirror, only with the realization that the Oceanians can't make them, either.
I think the way to do it would be to set it enough in the future that the Party's power is largely forgotten, and those who started outside (those living in the buffer zones in 1984) no longer have living memory of when the big empires mattered. They would retain a dim cultural mythology of the days when outsiders would conquer them and force them to work in factories etc., only to be conquered and enslaved by someone else, but no real sense of what they were like anymore. Then they discover that their previous overlords are really just tawdry, craven slaves themselves.
2184 could be an interesting book to write, no doubt about it.