interested in writing the technical side: he wrote in 1955 that "The most superficial appearance of plausibility--the merest sop to our critical intellect--will do.... I took a hero to Mars once in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus". How Lewis would have explored the threat from the Othertime world remains unknown. The text mentions an "idol" whose face is, in some way, recognizable to the Cambridge observers, and which is, the narrator says, "still there" at the end of the events to be narrated. How Lewis intended to follow up this foreshadowing is unclear; he may have intended to suggest links to contemporary world events, or may have had no precise idea in mind. The story could be interpreted as the germ of a dystopian novel like That Hideous Strength: the Stingingmen and Jerkies could parallel the Conditioners and the Conditioned as described in The Abolition of Man. The idol with many bodies and one head may express Lewis' horror, expressed in many of his works, at the absorption and suppression of the individual into a collective controlled by a single will: in Perelandra, referring to a similar loss of individuality, he speculates that "what the Pantheists falsely hoped for in Heaven, the wicked really receive in Hell". See also J. R. R. Tolkien's explorations of time travel References Sources Lewis, C. S. The Dark Tower. The Dark Tower and Other Stories. Harvest Books, 1977. Lewis, C.S., Aldiss, Brian, and Amis, Kingsley. "Unreal Estates" Spectrum IV. Pan Books, London, 1965. [For Lewis's interest in SF] Further reading Downing, David C., Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy. University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Himes, Jonathan B. "The Allegory of Lust: Textual and Sexual Deviance in The Dark Tower." Truths Breathed Through Silver: The Inklings' Moral and Mythopoeic Legacy. Ed. Jonathan B. Himes, with Joe R. Christopher and Salwa Khoddam. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 51-80. Schwartz, Sanford. Appendix A: "The Dark Tower." C. S. Lewis on the Final Frontier: Science and the Supernatural in the Space Trilogy. Oxford UP, 2009. 151-56. 1977 British novels The Space Trilogy books 1977 science fiction novels Unfinished novels Novels published posthumously William Collins, Sons books Literary forgeries Forgery controversies