Many authors often share their beliefs through their writing by making ideas they believe in appear important, and condemning those they do not. C.S. Lewis is an example of this type of author, who used his books to push ideas he believed in and denounced actions he feared. Two of his famous writings that address the issues of governmental and technological control are The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, therefore showing that Lewis used his writings to express his fears in the ways humanity was changing.
Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man mainly addresses the problems with education and the way people today have lost the ability to think for themselves. The third and final chapter discusses something else: how technology has allowed humans to conquer nature. Lewis believes that with the conquest of nature, some technologies are now believed to be essential to, if not survive, stay “modern.” Lewis states that the control over nature “means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men” (58). He means that the ones who run companies that create certain nature-conquering technologies, such as automobiles and computers, will be the ones in total control by choosing who, how, and when to sell their technology.
Lewis has a novel that also addresses these issues, but in a less upfront way. That Hideous Strength deals with what happens on a futuristic Earth when one company is attempting to control everything. The first two chapters follow a husband and wife named Mark and Jane. Mark works for Bracton College and is called in for a meeting with a company called N.I.C.E., who is purchasing a piece of land from the college. N.I.C.E. is supposed to represent a group of the “few hundreds of men” that Lewis writes about in The Abolition of Men that rule over everyone else. Lewis wrote a preface to the novel, where he states that That Hideous Strength “has behind it a serious “point” which I tried to make in my Abolition of Man” (7). He used That Hideous Strength as a way to share his ideas about total control to those more likely to read fiction.
The idea that the “hundreds of men” control everything is shown in the second chapter of That Hideous Strength. In the second chapter, Jane travels to the house of her friend/former tutor and his wife. She learns that they are being kicked off of their land because it is part of the large area that N.I.C.E. purchased from Bracton College. This event is exactly what Lewis discusses in The Abolition of Man, how the conquering of nature, shown in this novel as space travel, results in the absolute control of everyone by a few, powerful individuals.