Honest? I found bits and pieces of this book hard to understand. C.S. Lewis was a Professor at Cambridge, and he definitely used Collage-Professor-Sized words. Malediction, sanguine, intelligentsia, infinitesimally, and many other words of that size are used throughout the story. Granted, one can guess at their meaning by reading the rest of their sentence, but it takes away from the overall reading experience. I do like how Lewis changed things from how we are used to them on earth, such as the giant 'trees', thought process of the creatures that live on the other planet, the shapes of mountains, the intelligence of the 'aliens', and the temperature of the water... the storyline was fresh too, it is not one I have read before:
Ransom is a philologist , he studies languages. When we first see him he is hiking - he does this often when he does not have work. The place where he was going to spend the night turned him down. S, it is getting steadily darker, he is in the middle of nowhere, and he has no where to stay. Ransom ends up getting kidnapped, and when he wakes up he in a spaceship- looking out of the window he sees earth floating away, already the size of the moon. Who exactly are the people who kidnapped him? He finds out that they plan to leave him with the natives of where-ever-they-are-going, but why? Will there be any chance of escape? And then survival? Will he ever get back to earth, alive?
Be forewarned, this is the first in a trilogy.
2 comments:
I had trouble getting through the space trilogy, although some people adore it. I'll try it again someday, I'm sure. I was prob. 17 when I read Silent Planet.
But the kids in my story have the surname Ransome. An obscure nod to Lewis and the author of Swallows and Amazons. :)
cool! I love having meanings behind names of characters- it really tells you about the author... :)
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