"Silent Planet" play-by-play: Chapters 7 through 12

7: Well, Ransom, if you're going to make a break for freedom on an unknown planet, I'd say you picked the right one. This chapter sounds like Ray Bradbury struggling to describe a Dr. Seuss illustration, only with that C.S. Lewis touch.

8. I like the patheticness of Ransom being forced to talk to himself in absence of all others. But really, isn't that how we found him--alone? The author's only calling attention to it again now, and that means some other character's on the horizon. I wonder where his unearthly Man Friday's going to spring from.

9. There you go. And can I just say that Lewis' word choice in this chapter is fantastic? There's such a sense of violent movement even in the motionless. You can't even merely tilt back your head to look at it all--you have to throw your head back.

Maybe that's the reason this Hross creature has all my muscles tentatively tensed to spring, but I think not. I think it's because of that warning in the Narnia series about not trusting something that used to be human but isn't, or should be human and isn't, or is going to be but isn't yet. Like Ransome, I want to like the Hross, but I'm still a little shaky. After all, we just met.

(On a side note--curse you, Lady Gaga. It's your fault that I can't read the word "Malacandra" without mentally setting it to music. "Malacandra, Malacandra...Mala-Malacandra, Mala-Malacandra..." It's making me madder than Ransom.)

10. The end of this chapter was almost like a dim nightmare version of one of the outdoor feasts that would randomly happen in Narnia.

11. Whoo, turning point! I love how Ransom isn't letting go of this patronizing assumption that the Hross are utterly primitive despite all evidence to the contrary (they have religion! They have poetry!) I thought at first he was just being stupid, and that it was a satire of English superiority to the colonized nations, but maybe it's more than just that--he knows he's wrong, but he's afraid to admit it, so he holds on to the idea he's more comfortable with.

I'm guessing Maleldil the Young is Jesus and the Old One is God the Father--maybe the science fiction equivalents of Aslan and the Emperor Beyond the Sea.

12. The philosophical discussion in this chapter is so artfully pulled off, almost like the poetry it mentions. A lesser author would have made it heavy-handed and dull, but here it's almost like the "eldila", the things you can mistake for a sunbeam, which I suppose are angels.

Ransom knows the words now, but he's still struggling to find the meaning. Maybe the next six chapters will clear things up...