That Hideous Strength
- 382
- Pages
- about 7 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“That Hideous Strength” closes Lewis’s “Space Trilogy” on Earth, with a dark tale of a scientific institute fronting for supernatural forces. It follows a married couple, Jane and Mark, on separate paths: his reads like psychological horror relieved by flashes of farce, hers stays with her thoughts and feelings, and the alternation works. Some readers feel Lewis explains too much, and others do not grasp all of the ending. A very different book from the two before it.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups is a 1945 novel by C. S. Lewis, the final book in Lewis's theological science fiction Space Trilogy. The events of this novel follow those of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra and once again feature the philologist Elwin Ransom. Yet unlike the principal events of those two novels, the story takes place on Earth rather than elsewhere in the Solar System. The story involves an ostensibly scientific institute, the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), which is a front for sinister supernatural forces.
Reading order · The Space Trilogy
Full order & progress →- Out of the Silent PlanetStart here
7.77.7 / 10 - Perelandra
7.77.7 / 10 - That Hideous StrengthThis book
7.67.6 / 10
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.3 across 156 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 51% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Science fiction average of 7.8. That is how 7.6 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 6.9 | 13 | 8% |
| Hardcover | 7.3 | 143 | 92% |
Frequently asked
How long is That Hideous Strength?
It has 382 pages — shorter than 82% of the ranked books in Science fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Science fiction — with scores between 7.4 and 7.8, closest to this book.
