Which C.S. Lewis novel features the fictional society of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments?

That Hideous Strength features the fictional society called the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments.

Published in 1945, the novel is the third volume of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, although its action occurs mainly on Earth. The organization, commonly abbreviated NICE, presents itself as a scientific and administrative project. Lewis portrays it as an institution whose claims of progress conceal ambitions to control human life.

The story follows Mark and Jane Studdock as they become entangled with competing forces. Its setting combines academic satire, political anxiety, Arthurian material, and supernatural conflict. Lewis was writing shortly after the Second World War, when debates about technology, bureaucracy, and social planning were especially prominent.

NICE is fictional and should not be confused with a real scientific body. The novel’s title comes from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, whose lines about a “hideous strength” Lewis adapted for the book’s epigraph and title.