Out Of The Silent Planet by: C.S. Lewis

C

In my studies of: animation, comics, and film making I've learned that story is pretty much king in any project. C.S. Lewis is definately one of the modern "kings" of literature in my opinion, but this book didn't really score as highly as his other work in my mind.
The story is an account of how a man named Dr. Ransom was high-jacked while traveling on foot through the Brittish countryside by two other scientsits, Dr. Weston and Dr. Devine. The two villains forcefully take Ransom to the planet Malacandra where they intend to offer him as a living sacrifice to the inhabitants of the planet.
I liked the book all the way up to about the middle where Dr. Ransom was learning about the culture and language of the natives of Malacandra, and Lewis intigrates a few of the Malacandrean terms into the regular text of the book so you almost feel like you're learning a bit of the language along with Ransom. The qualms that I had with the story came somewhere around three quarters of the way through the book where it was time for some of the conflict to be resolved. I found the resolutions to some of the problems the main character faced to come too easily without much struggle. In all fairness this is only the first book of a space trilogy, so I do have more reading to do.
At the very end of the book Lewis includes a fictional postcript in the form of a correspondance that he had with Dr. Ransom. I really love it when authors come up with a clever backstory to how they supposedly came across the tale they just wrote. This sort of fictionalizing even the reality of the book goes hand in hand with Lewis' "Screwtape Letters" where he claims that he came into posession of a collection of letters that two demons wrote to eachother.
All in all, I'll have to read the following two books to formulate my complete opinion of this sci-fi story, but as of right now I find it lacking in suspence. I may change my mind upon reading the rest of the trilogy.