Welcome to the Hillsdale College online courses podcast.

I am Jeremiah Regan.

And I'm Juan Davados.

We are back with Totalitarian Novels, Lecture 7, That Hidious Strength, Faith.

So here we have Dr. Arne providing a plot summary and analysis of our fourth totalitarian novel,

That Hidious Strength by C.S. Lewis.

This book's very interesting.

I'll describe the setting briefly in contrast to the other books.

1984 takes place in the near future. Brave. 1984 takes place in the near future. Brave New

World takes place in the distant future. Darkness at noon takes place in current day in a real

regime, and that hideous strength takes place in the very near future as a totalitarian regime

is trying to get started. So it's the only one in which the regime has not

become totalitarian. You're seeing its genesis and ultimately, and if you listen to the episode,

sorry, this won't be a spoiler by the end of it, but it fails. So it makes it the only

totalitarian novel with a truly happy ending. And it's a book by C.S. Lewis, which is interesting because, you know,

for all of those C.S. Lewis fans out there, you've heard of Narnia, you've heard of

abolition of man, you've probably read, um, mere Christianity. Right. Mere Christianity.

Till we have faces. All of the most famous C.S. Lewis books, but I feel like the space trilogy is one that is less well known, but everybody that has read it typically likes it more than any of the other C.S. Louis books.

It's one of my favorite series. It's some of my favorite works of Lewis. And as a note,

it's best to read all three because Lewis is brilliant and they're beautiful, but you can read

that hideous strength as a standalone book. It's the least science fictiony and the most political

of all of them. And he really wrote it as a fictional companion piece to the abolition of man and

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