My CS Lewis illustration for my favorite authors project. Most people associate CS Lewis with the Chronicles of Narnia, but he has actually written a great deal other than that. His adult literature is equally vivid, but more intellectual and perhaps a bit less watered down. Here I have chosen to illustrate a scene from "Out of the Silent Planet," which is the first book in his sci-fi trilogy.

The planet is called Malacandra (but it's actually supposed to be Mars)*. Malacandra is home to 3 indigenous sentient species and one extraterrestrial form of sentience which cohabitates with the natives and rules them. I elected to depict a place called Meldilorn, which is an island in a lake, and is the administrative center for the whole planet. Up in the center of the island is a sacred grove from which the monarch rules. CS Lewis seems to have a thing for sacred groves. Many travelors from the 3 indigenous sentient species congregate there and interact for a variety of reasons. I chose this scene because I wanted to get a wide panarama of the landscape while also giving a good sampling of the sentient beings. The tall semi-humanoid beings are called Sorns, and the Sorns are the scientists and historians of Malacandra. The shorter furry creatures with wiskers are called Hrossa (singular=Hross), the Hrossa are the poets, musicians, and farmers. The weird looking yellow critter is a Pfifltrigg (pluralfifltriggi). The Pfifltriggi are the engineers, artisans, and craftsmen, they have a mentality somewhat similar to dwarves. There is only one Pfifltrigg because they were hard to draw, and because they are more homogenous than the Sorns and Hrossa. The Sorns and Hrossa come in different varities or races as humanity does. There are black hrossa, silver hrossa, and white hrossa, or at least the main character saw one when he was on Meldilorn, so I depicted him emerging from the house. The white one is also a hnakrapunt, hence his prodigious physique. I elected to draw a Sorn female just to see if I could pull it off, and I made her a Soroborn (red variety of Sorn). I tried to show all the diversity I could, and I would have drawn a female Hross but I had no idea how to go about doing that, for obvious reasons.

I also considered whether I ought to draw genetalia on all of them, because aside from the Pfifltriggi everyone on Malacandra is naked. As it was CS Lewis had the Sorns covered in a feather like coating that resembled clothing, and the Hrossa are covered in fur. However, should I choose to Illustrate "Perelandra" the situation will be different.

Anyways, I hope everyone has as much fun looking at it as I had drawing it. I drew everything the way I pictured it based on the descriptions. Done with colored pencil and ink.



*It's interesting what a profound influence the speculations of Giovanni Scapereli (spelling?) had on people's perception of solar cosmology even up into the 20th century. It was taken for granted by most people that Mars was inhabitable, and possibly inhabited. All of the sci-fi writers I have read from the early 1900's (Lewis, HG Wells, Burroughs), wrote stories of an inhabited Mars in which the canyons were actually irrigation canals. This sort of mentality was near universal in its pervasiveness, as evidenced by the huge scare that occured during Orson Wells' radio classic radio broadcast/hoax based on HG Wells' "War of the Worlds." Of course today we know that Mars is uninhabitable so it is no longer used as a setting for an inhabited alien world. Still, I would not be surprised if evidence of sentient life was found on Mars. In fact in a way it already has been with the Cydonia region.



My favorite authors project:

JRR Tolkien: [link]
CS Lewis:
Isaac Asimov: [link]
Frank Herbert: [link]
Brian Herbert: [link]
Frank Peretti:
Edger Rice Burroughs: