by David Naugle
C. S. Lewis titled That Hideous Strength after a line in a poem by Sir David Lyndsay called "Ane Dialog" (1555) in which Lyndsay was describing the biblical Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9): "The shadow of that hideous strength, Six miles and more it is of length."
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| Cover of First Edition, 1945 |
Lewis considered
That Hideous Strength to be a fictionalized version of the themes in his book of three lectures,
The Abolition of Man. In the preface to
That Hideous Strength, Lewis states, “This is a ‘tall story‘ [pun probably intended] about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.” In
The Abolition of Man, among many things, Lewis offered his thoughts to an audience from the University of Durham in February 1943 on education, the natural law tradition, and the necessity of moral oversight of the institution of science and its practitioners. In
That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups, first published in 1945, he breathes life into these ideas in a primary character of the book, in his description of the aggressive vision of the scientific group called N. I. C. E. (The National Institute for Coordinated Experiments), and in his attribution of N. I. C. E.’s views and actions to the demons, or … “devilry.”
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