What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel about the modern misuse of science and technology?
Answer
That Hideous Strength
That Hideous Strength is C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel about the modern misuse of science and technology.
The novel is the third book in Lewis’s Space Trilogy, following Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. Unlike its predecessors, it is set mainly on Earth. Its plot centers on the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, or N.I.C.E., a powerful organization that seeks to reshape humanity through science, bureaucracy, and the removal of moral limits.
The story follows Mark and Jane Studdock while also bringing back Elwin Ransom. Lewis drew on concerns about totalitarian systems, technocratic power, and the dehumanizing use of scientific progress. The title comes from a line by the seventeenth-century poet David Lyndsay, quoted as an epigraph. It is not the same book as The Abolition of Man, Lewis’s nonfiction critique of similar intellectual dangers.