Less famed than his Narnia chronicles, but no less critically acclaimed, is CS Lewis`s Space Trilogy, the story of a university professor from Earth who is kidnapped by a colleague as part of a convoluted plot by the forces of darkness to rule the solar system. He travels to and explores Mars and Venus, getting to know their inhabitants and the intentions of their metaphysical counterparts.
Regardless of Lewis`s persistent evangelical bent, the story is compelling, and some of the seriously outdated imagery he used has stuck with me since reading the books over 10 years ago. In one chapter, the kidnapped professor finds himself lying on the floor of a room. He can`t understand why the floor space is tiny, and yet the ceiling is enormous. When he inspects the point at which the walls intersect the floor, the join is at right angles, so he is sure the walls are not sloping outwards. He finally realises he is travelling through space in a perfectly round vessel with its own gravity, so his floor is close to the core of the globe, while the ceiling forms its circumference.
The second idea that captured my imagination was of his arrival for the first time on one of our neighbouring planets. Upon awakening, he looks around him, but is unable to make his eyes focus on any of the surrounding objects, because the natural colouring of the geographic and plant material is so different from Earth`s that he cannot rationally deduce its distance.
Dreaming of space travel
The idea that Mars is a habitable planet has long captured the imagination of Earth`s population.
Georgina Guedes, Journalist, ITWeb
The idea that Mars is a habitable planet has long captured the imagination of Earth`s population. Yet, modern space travel has so far only managed to find traces of single-cell organisms fossilised in space rock - a far cry from the bug-eyed aliens that Hollywood has been churning out for the better half of a century. Even the movie moguls endowed with permanent suspension of disbelief have reluctantly admitted that for alien movies to possess any level of plausibility, their fictional galactic visitors will need to come calling from the inaccessible reaches of space.
The reluctance of Earthlings to embrace Mars as a desert planet consisting mostly of red sand and rock was illustrated by the ad for a certain printer manufacturer where a bunch of spindly-legged aliens used their printer to fabricate a barren landscape. This landscape was then shown to the last Mars probe that we launched from Earth, which dutifully sent the pictures back to us.
A few short leaps away
Last year, Mars was a glowing red orb suspended in our night skies, closer to earth than it has ever been in recorded history. This year, a Rover probe called Spirit has been sent to The Red Planet and doesn`t seem to be experiencing the irritating navigational snags the last one did. George Bush recently announced his intentions of sending a manned ship to Mars and establishing a colony on the moon. We are poised on the brink of one of the most exciting periods of space exploration in history. And amid all this fanfare, we are receiving images back from Spirit showing a barren red landscape of which any xenophobic alien would be proud.
We are kept updated on the movements of this little vessel, and in the next couple of days we`ll be sitting on the edge of our seats while this golf-cart-sized craft makes its way to a nearby depression in the earth. In spite of myself, I do find all of this quite exciting. I mean we really are getting to grips with the 'final frontier`. I just wish it wasn`t all so red and dusty.
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