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A review by nwhyte
The Dark Tower and Other Stories by C.S. Lewis, Walter Hooper
4.0
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2550823.html
A collection of stories by C.S. Lewis, including the time-travel story of the title. It's not finished, but it would have been an interesting read - the Dark Tower itself turns out to be a replica of Cambridge University Library, built in an Othertime by people who our hero tries to understand. I think Lewis was probably better advised to go to Venus rather than take this route, but there are elements of the story that made it into That Hideous Strength. I see that there is some controversy about the extent to which Lewis's literary executor Walter Hooper may have had a hand in the text; I didn't detect anything that set off my alarm bells.
The other interesting fragment in the book is the very last one, about Helen's return to Menelaus after the siege of Troy - only a few pages, but taking the stroy in a slightly different direction.
I had not realised that Lewis published two stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. One of these, "Ministering Angels", is an awful pile of sexism, but the other, "Forms of Things Unknown", struck me as rather good, as did the two other complete shorts, "The Shoddy Lands" and "The Man Born Blind".
A collection of stories by C.S. Lewis, including the time-travel story of the title. It's not finished, but it would have been an interesting read - the Dark Tower itself turns out to be a replica of Cambridge University Library, built in an Othertime by people who our hero tries to understand. I think Lewis was probably better advised to go to Venus rather than take this route, but there are elements of the story that made it into That Hideous Strength. I see that there is some controversy about the extent to which Lewis's literary executor Walter Hooper may have had a hand in the text; I didn't detect anything that set off my alarm bells.
The other interesting fragment in the book is the very last one, about Helen's return to Menelaus after the siege of Troy - only a few pages, but taking the stroy in a slightly different direction.
I had not realised that Lewis published two stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. One of these, "Ministering Angels", is an awful pile of sexism, but the other, "Forms of Things Unknown", struck me as rather good, as did the two other complete shorts, "The Shoddy Lands" and "The Man Born Blind".