Which C.S. Lewis novel follows Mark Studdock at the fictional N.I.C.E.?

That Hideous Strength follows Mark Studdock at the fictional N.I.C.E.

Published in 1945, That Hideous Strength is the third and final novel in C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, also called the Space Trilogy. Unlike the earlier books, much of its action takes place on Earth, in an English setting threatened by an apparently scientific and bureaucratic organization.

Mark Studdock is a sociologist who becomes involved with the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, abbreviated N.I.C.E. The organization presents itself as a force for progress, but the novel portrays its ambitions as spiritually and morally dangerous. Jane Studdock, Mark’s wife, has a parallel storyline involving dreams and a community resisting the institute.

The novel draws on Lewis’s concerns about technocracy, propaganda, and the reduction of human beings to objects of management. It is not simply a conventional science-fiction adventure, and its title echoes a line from the sixteenth-century poet David Lindsay.