[Greetings, friends, from London! Yesterday, I landed in England and will spend a few days in London before heading to Wales (Penrhyndeudraeth to be exact) for ten days. As an author, one of my favorite things to do is spend time in the geography that carries the spirit of the book I am working on (which is, at the time being, a re-imagining of the myth of Perceval).

So, I will be doing just that for the next ten days. Trying to sit with and absorb the spirit of the setting where my protagonist, Perceval, grows up—a peasant boy raised far from the courts of Camelot who grows to become the Grail Knight and redeem a wasteland. Trying to immerse myself in the imagining of what the place might have looked like in the 6th century, after Rome left the Britons to fend for themselves against the Scots flooding in from the North and the Saxons pouring in from the East. Trying to put myself in the mindset of a people existing at the intersection of the myths and traditions of the Celtic, Greek, Roman, and early Christian worlds.

Alongside this adventure, I’ve found myself thinking a lot (as I often do) about C.S. Lewis and what he was trying to do with his works… about how I might be able to add to, build on, or put my own twist on some of the things he worked into his stories. Lewis’s great influence on me as a writer is no secret. Anyone who reads my books will see his fingerprints everywhere. (In the current book I’m working on, Lewis is rivaled by Tolkien, Christopher Paolini, and Stephen Lawhead.)

There are a few of Lewis’s ideas, in particular, that come back around to my contemplation like a boomerang. One of those ideas is something he often explored in his fiction: “Were all the things which appeared as mythology on Earth scattered through other worlds as realities?” This is a question that Lewis has the character Ransom ask in his Ransom (or Space) Trilogy. And it is the leaping off point for much of Lewis’s science fiction.

This makes sense if we remember Lewis as a scholar of Plato. Suppose we work backward from the Platonic idea of the Forms existing outside time and space. In that case, we can understand this idea that other worlds, planets, and times might produce something like shadows or copies of the Forms in the same way that things on Earth produce our own particular variant of those same Forms. This context sets the stage for Lewis’s fiction and its exploration of things like time travel, space travel, and parallel universes.

We see some of Lewis’s most raw and unfiltered thoughts on this topic in his unfinished work titled The Dark Tower (not to be confused with the series by Stephen King, though they were inspired by the same Browning poem titled Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came). Alongside The Chronicles of Narnia, The Ransom Trilogy (which I covered in On the Silent Planet, On Perelandra, and On That Hideous Strength), and Till We Have Faces, The Dark Tower (and Other Short Stories) represents the entire bibliography of Lewis’s fiction works.

In The Dark Tower, we find a book that many (except the most devout fan) will say to skip—often citing Lewis’s own abandonment as all the evidence one needs to dismiss it as little more than a failed sequel to Out of the Silent Planet which Perelandra eventually replaced. I’ll grant critics that the book is strange, confusing at times, and has the curse of all unfinished work—that it builds a bridge to nowhere. But on the matter of its worth as reading material, I could not disagree more.

As a work, it holds more than enough insights and questions to ponder to reward the close reader. This is especially true if the reader, like me, finds fascination in the craft of writing and interest in how artists reveal themselves in entire bodies of work. In this respect, The Dark Tower presents something none of Lewis’s other finished works provide—a look into his unrefined and (relatively) unfiltered mind. We get a glimpse at the early stages of his process. (Assuming, of course, that the work is genuinely Lewis.)

Mix this in with the book’s mystery and its discussion of time travel and multiverses, and it contains more than enough, in my view, to be wildly entertaining. Plus, it has the benefit of being short enough to be read in a day—the manuscript found by Walter Hooper consisted of 62 sheets of ruled paper, numbered 1 to 64. Pages 11 and 49 were missing, and it breaks off mid-sentence on page 64.

But that’s enough of a buildup from me. It is to The Dark Tower and Lewis’s musings on time travel, mythology, and the multiverse, that we devote the rest of today’s essay.]

There is no way around it. The Dark Tower by C.S. Lewis is a strange book. And anyone who encounters it without being familiar with Lewis’s general body of work is liable to consider it only worth the warmth it might provide in a fire.

This is the exact determination made by those in charge of clearing Lewis’s estate, who had decided to burn the unfinished manuscript when rummaging through Lewis’s things. Only at the urging of Lewis’s gardener, Fred Paxford, was the manuscript spared from destruction before his colleague Walter Hooper could secure its preservation.1

Those familiar with Lewis’s Space Trilogy might remember that the first installment—Out of the Silent Planet—ends with a fictional letter from the main character, Dr. Elwin Ransom of Cambridge, to his friend C.S. Lewis. In it, Ransom remarks “if there is to be any more space-travelling, it will have to be time-travelling as well…” This sets up the opening lines of The Dark Tower, which appears to have started as Out of the Silent Planet’s sequel before being abandoned and (eventually) replaced by Perelandra (perhaps because Lewis wrote himself into a plot he couldn’t see a way through).

‘Of course,’ said Orfieu, ‘the sort of time-travelling you read about in books—time-travelling in the body—is absolutely impossible.”2

Starting from this premise, Lewis goes on to explore several of the profound philosophical concepts and questions that recur throughout Lewis’s wider body of work, including, but not limited to: what might humans find if and when they can freely travel through space and time; what if Plato was right that everything we see is a shadow or copy of a real thing existing elsewhere and that all knowledge was just a remembering; where does a technocratic society lead? But before we can examine these concepts, we start with a (rough) summary of The Dark Tower. At this risk of losing the reader in the weeds, I have woven the manuscript’s discussions of “time” travel and the multiverse into the summary to set up our discussion of the themes that will follow.

Summary: A Philosophical Take on Time Travel and Metaverses

The story begins with a group of academics discussing time travel at a university (Cambridge) during summer vacation. They conclude, led by the character Orfieu, that it is impossible to violate the laws of space-time in such a way—their argument hinging on the premise that the matter which makes one’s body is being used for other purposes in every other time (which, itself, hinges on the premise that energy, as something that can be neither created nor destroyed, cannot have duplicates).

‘[T]ime-travelling clearly means going into the future or the past. Now where will the particles that compose your body be five hundred years hence? They’ll be all over the place—some in the earth, some in plants and animals, and some in the bodies of your descendants, if you have any. Thus, to go to the year 3000 AD means going to a time at which your body doesn’t exist; and that means, according to one hypothesis, becoming nothing, and, according to the other, becoming a disembodied spirit.’

‘But half a moment,’ said I, rather foolishly, ‘you don’t need to find a body waiting for you in the year 3000. You would take your present body with you.’

‘But don’t you see that’s just what you can’t do?’ said Orfieu. ‘All the matter which makes up your body now will be being used for different purposes in 3000.’3

After a little back and forth, they ultimately conclude that if one wants to travel in time, it must be done through sight.

‘If we are able to have experience of times before our birth and after our death it must be done in some quite different way. If the thing is possible it must consist in looking at another time while we ourselves remain here—as we look at the stars through telescopes while we remain on the Earth. What one wants, in fact, is not a sort of time flying-machine but something which does to time what the telescope does to space.’4

Following this introductory discussion, one of the men (Orfieu) unveils an invention he believes allows people to see through time. The group uses this “chronoscope” to observe an alien world they call “Othertime” (they do not know if it is future or past), where a group of human automatons work to construct a tower (the Dark Tower) at the bidding of the story’s villain, the “Unicorn” (or “Stingingman”)—a devilish but human (or possibly semi-human) character with a single horn growing out of his forehead. The Unicorn stings people, apparently volunteers, causing them to become automatons (the “Jerkies”).

The effect on the victims was always the same. They entered the room as men, or (more rarely) women; they left it automata. In recompense—if you call it a recompense—they entered it in awe, and left it all with the same clockwork swagger.5

After several sessions observing this “Othertime,” the group discovers it possesses some unknown number of “doubles”—that is, people whose resemblance to those on Earth is uncanny. It is first discovered when the crew observes that Orfieu’s assistant, Scudamour. Increasingly, the observers wonder if Othertime really is the past or future, or whether it is some other reality.

They watch as Scudamour’s double grows a sting and becomes the new Unicorn. During one viewing session, Scudamour sees the Unicorn about to sting the double of his fiancée, Camilla. In a blind fury, he rushes at the screen and somehow switches bodies with the Unicorn.

The remainder of the text deals with his experiences in Othertime and his colleagues’ attempt to hunt down the Unicorn in this world. In Othertime, Scudamour survives by playing on his authority, his only card, while he tries to learn. To his amazement, he discovers a chronoscope in the Unicorn’s room where he stung victims—but it is now broken. He refrains from stinging Camilla, and begins trying to plan an escape. In the background, we learn of a war (being waged by the “White Riders,” who want to remove the stingers from the “Unicorns”) being waged against the Othertime government.

Researching for the attempted escape, Scudamour reads in a library about the Othertimer’s time-science. A theory of multiple timelines is given; these do not seem to split off from different outcomes, like quantum realities, but simply proceed separately.

‘It was anciently believed,’ he read, ‘that space had three dimensions and time but one, and our fathers commonly pictured time as a stream or thin cord, the present being a moving point on that cord or a floating leaf on that stream. The direction backwards from the present was called the past, as it still is, and the direction forwards the future. What is a little more remarkable is that only one such stream or cord was believed to exist, and that the universe was thought to contain no other events or states than those which occupied, at some point or other, the stream or cord along which or own present is travelling. There were not lacking, indeed, philosophers who pointed out that this was merely a fact of experience and that we could give no reason why time had only one dimension and why there was only a single time; indeed more than one of the early chronologists hazarded the idea tha time might itself be a dimension of space—an idea which will seem almost fantastically perverse to us, but which, in their state of knowledge, deserve the praise of ingenuity. In general, however, such interest as the ancients took in time was diverted from fruitful inquiries by their vain efforts to discover means of what they called ‘time-travel,’ by which they meant nothing more than reversal or acceleration of the mind’s movement along our own unilinear time.’

‘This is not the place,’ (here Scudamour groaned again) ‘to describe the experiments which, in the thirtieth year of the tenth era, convinced chronologists that the time in which we live has lateral fluctuations; in other words that the cord or stream is not to be represented by a straight line but by a wavy line. It is difficult for us to realise how revolutionary this discovery at first appeared. So deeply rooted were the old conceptions that we read of thinkers who could not concieve such fluctuation. They inquired in what, or into what, the time cord deviated when it deviated from the straight; and their reluctance to allow the obvious answer (that it deviated, or into time, in an eckwards or andwards direction) gave a new lease of life to the perverse doctrine we have already noted, which was now called the doctrine of Space Time.6

As Scudamour makes his way through the history of time travel discoveries by people of the Othertime, the law is stated that “two time-lines approximate to the exact degree to which their material contents are alike,”7 and it is revealed that an experiment with a replica railway shed in the right place had produced a sufficient likeness in material content to facilitate a transfer of minds (like the one Scudamour experienced). Reference is made to their original changeling myth, where the discoverer successfully swapped an Othertime child for one from Earth. Here, with Scudamour still reading, the text of The Dark Tower cuts abruptly.

The abrupt ending of the manuscript leaves us with more questions than answers, which is perhaps fitting for a work concerned with the limitations of human knowledge. Yet within this unfinished frame, Lewis establishes several profound philosophical concepts that recur throughout his broader corpus. The Dark Tower, the chronoscope, the Stingingman, the Jerkies and the idol they pray to… all of these serve as vehicles for Lewis’s exploration of modernity’s philosophical, moral, and spiritual crises.

In Plato’s Shadow: Forms, Copies, and Anamnesis

We must start with Plato’s theory of the Forms, which supplies a unifying framework for understanding The Dark Tower. For Plato, true reality consists of eternal, perfect Forms, while the physical objects we perceive are merely imperfect copies of these Forms. Our knowledge of truth depends on recognizing the relationship between physical copies and their perfect Forms.

In The Dark Tower, the relationship between our world and Othertime highlights this Platonic idea. Neither world represents perfect reality; rather, both reflect some deeper truth that transcends both. The doubles and towers that exist in both worlds illustrate this. The doubles suggest that individuals are not self-contained entities but manifestations of archetypes that transcend individual existence; the duplication of the tower (between the Dark Tower and the library of Cambridge) points to the possibility that certain Forms don’t just transcend time, place, and cultures on Earth, but can be transposed across time and space cosmically. Universal patterns, in other words, are truly universal.

Then there is the chronoscope, which itself functions as a modern version of Plato’s cave. Just as the prisoners in Plato’s allegory mistake shadows for reality, the Cambridge observers must question whether what they see through the chronoscope represents true reality or its shadow. With the chronoscope, Lewis reconstructs creates the same philosophical problem that Plato identified—the challenge of knowing reality through limited sensory experience—but transposes it into a science fiction context that makes the ancient philosophical question accessible to modern readers. When the group of academics start to wonder “if Othertime really is the past or future, or whether it is some other reality,” they are forced to confront this question of whether their world, like Othertime, is also a copy of something prior in time and purer in Form.

This brings us to Lewis’s broader corpus and his essay, “Transposition,” where Lewis argues that higher realities often find expression in lower realms through limited, imperfect forms—just as three-dimensional realities must be transposed into two dimensions when drawn on paper. Mythology, in this view, represents humanity’s attempt to transpose higher realities into the limited language and concepts available to us. The Stingingman in “The Dark Tower” is precisely such a transposition made visible—a higher reality that appears monstrous or mythic when viewed from our limited perspective (just as an outsider might view the Minotaur or Medusa).

If we start from these premises, and take them to be true, we have the foundation for Plato’s theories on the immortality of the soul and his concept of anamnesis—that knowledge is remembering and learning is the process of recovering what the soul possessed before birth but forgot during the trauma of being made into form.8

The New Babel: Technocratic Towers and Totalitarian Leviathans

One of Lewis’s chief concerns in his literary life was a worry about where the technocratic and totalitarian trends of his day were leading (and how we, as a species, got there). He explores these concerns in The Dark Tower through the tower itself, the people (Jerkies) building it, and the idol they worship. Here’s how the idol is described:

Against the right-hand wall, well forward and opposite the Man, there was a squat pillar surmounted by a curious idol. At first I could hardly make out what it was, but I know it well enough now. It is an image in which a number of small human bodies culminate in a single large head. The bodies are nude, some are male and some female. They are very nasty. I do not think they are meant wantonly, unless the taste of the Othertime in such matters differs remarkably from our own. They seem rather to express a savagely satiric vision, as if the sculptor hated and despised what he was making.9

This idol with many bodies and one head appears to be a direct reference to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and its famous cover illustration (below), which depicts the commonwealth as a gigantic human form built out of the bodies of its citizens with the sovereign as its head. In Hobbes’s philosophy, this imagery represents the state created when individuals surrender some of their freedoms to a central authority in exchange for safety and security. Hobbes viewed this arrangement as necessary and beneficial; Lewis, on the other hand, thought it was horrific—a dystopian vision of individuality sacrificed to the wrong end.

The idol represents something Lewis thought was Hell-ish—that is, the absorption and suppression of the individual into a collective controlled by a single human will (as opposed to God’s will). This characteristic of dictatorship infested Europe at the time Lewis was writing—faith and obedience to God were increasingly redirected toward governments and leaders. Figures like Hitler and Stalin and Mao sold people some version of the same lie told to the Jerkies in Othertime:

‘We are told,’ said Camilla, ‘to pray to his image, and then he himself will come from behind us and lay his hundred hands upon our heads and breathe into us the greater life so that we shall live no longer with our own life but with his. No one has ever dreamed it was the Unicornman. We were told you bore strings not for us but for our enemies.’10

The image of the idol serves as a powerful visual metaphor for Lewis’s concerns about totalitarianism, collectivism, and the suppression of the individual. It connects The Dark Tower to his other works, particularly That Hideous Strength, where he explores similar themes about the danger of scientific advancement divorced from moral foundations. This connection also reinforces the Tower of Babel parallel discussed below, as both represent human attempts to achieve power through the concentration of power, followed by collective action that ultimately leads to dehumanization.

In Genesis, the Tower of Babel represented mankind’s eternal attempts to break free from, and supplant the need for, God through an invention of its own. “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let’s make a name for ourselves.”11 The mysterious structure being built in Othertime serves a similar purpose, in part symbolized by the fact that the Othertime tower is revealed to be a replica of the new Cambridge University Library—itself a shrine to human knowledge.

Lewis’s incomplete metaphor in the unfinished The Dark Tower sees its completion in the third installment of the Ransom Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, named after a line from Sir David Lyndsay’s poem, Ane Dialog (1555), describing the Tower of Babel: “The shadow of that hideous strength, Six miles and more it is of length.” In That Hideous Strength, it is N.I.C.E. headquarters that represents a modern Tower of Babel—a structure symbolizing humanity’s attempt to reach divine status through scientific advancement rather than through traditional construction.

In both these works, we see Lewis working out in fiction his academic idea that science had replaced the role magic had played in previous cultures—exploiting nature to serve humanity’s ends. This is precisely the threat embodied by both the N.I.C.E. and the mysterious forces behind the Dark Tower.

The automatons in The Dark Tower and the “conditioned” people in That Hideous Strength both represent the dehumanizing consequence of this Tower of Babel mindset—humans reduced to tools in service of an arrogant vision.

The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes. But for their one mistake, there would be no hope left. If of their own evil will they had not broken the frontier and let in the celestial Powers, this would be their moment of victory. Their own strength has betrayed them. They have gone to the gods who would not have come to them, and pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads. Therefore they will die.12

In both works, Lewis portrays scientific advancement without moral guidance as a new Tower of Babel—not simply a physical structure but a manifestation of human pride that inevitably leads to confusion and downfall. In That Hideous Strength, this culminates in the “spell of Babel” being cast upon the N.I.C.E. members, causing them to speak gibberish and thus destroying their ability to communicate—directly paralleling the biblical story. How Lewis would have finished The Dark Tower we’ll never know, but we can imagine he would have found a way to complete the vision of the Dark Tower as a New Tower of Babel.

Hollow Men: First Emptied Then Possessed

Those familiar with The Abolition of Man will recognize Men Without Chests in the automatons of The Dark Tower. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis argues that a society which trains its youth on reason, logic, skepticism, and the scientific method without developing moral sentiments produces humans who lack the middle element between intellect and animal instinct—the “chest” that is the seat of the soul.

In The Dark Tower, the automatons are the ultimate manifestation of this concept. They’ve been literally “emptied’ by the Stingingman’s sting, leaving them without the capacity for moral choice or genuine humanity. They become obedient functionaries who live only as vessels of the Stinginman’s will. Like the “Men Without Chests,” they retain intellectual capability but lack the moral center and autonomy that makes them fully human. They represent the end result of what Lewis feared would happen to humanity if we continued down the path of moral relativism and the rejection of objective values.

This emptying, Lewis feared, left a vacuum to be filled. And in a world increasingly dismissive of God, that vacuum would be filled with more sinister spirits. We see this possession dynamic at play when Scudamor swaps places with his nefarious double from Othertime—a swap facilitated by the strong emotion of anger where “all went red” and Scudamour felt like “he must smash something.”13 This emotional state dissolves the barrier between worlds, allowing the exchange of consciousness to occur.

This partially parallels what happens in Perelandra, where the Unman (Professor Weston) undergoes a transformation where his consciousness is replaced by or merged with a demonic entity. This process begins when Weston’s philosophical hubris and pride cracks open the door and ends with Weston’s full invitation of something else to inhabit him. That something else, as it turns out, is the spirit of the Devil.

Lewis contrasts this type of emptied then possessed individual with the fully-expressed human, a theme he explores in Till We Have Faces, his retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth. In that novel, the protagonist Orual initially understands divine reality through distorted, shadowy perceptions before ultimately encountering the gods directly. Her line, “How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?” expresses Lewis’s belief that authentic selfhood is a prerequisite to encountering higher reality. As Lewis says in Mere Christianity, “[h]ow monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.”

Conclusion: To the Dark Tower We Come

All of this leads me to the conclusion that The Dark Tower, despite being “strange” and incomplete, has much to remind the modern man. Just as we are standing, once again, in the shadows of Babel, we are coming (as I suppose we always are) to that eternal Dark Tower.

Our Dark Tower comes complete with its own chronoscope—modern technologies that mediate our experience of reality: social media, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence all promise to expand our perceptual horizons while simultaneously constraining us within technological frameworks as we increasingly experience reality through screens.

What we must remember, however, is that this experience of more realities is not the experience of reality itself; it can deliver us more examples of the copies, but we must not mistake it for the Form, lest we seek in the shadows what can only be found in the Sun. Our smartphones and computers might allow us to observe distant or imagined realities, but it is an experience that is half-hollow because it keeps us physically separate.

The risk is that we give in to the dopaminergic allure of seeing more and mistaking it for progress or knowledge, slowly shaping ourselves into observers of life rather than participants. The danger Lewis identifies is not in technology itself, but in its potential to quicken the proliferation of “Men Without Chests”—individuals who possess knowledge without wisdom, information without a moral center or trained soul.

This, then, is the invitation: cultivate the sentiments through embodied experience. Explore the world and feel the energy of the spaces move through your body. See it not through a screen but with your own eyes. Check perception against reality. Feel what comes up in you. Recognize that disembodied knowledge is not wisdom. Contemplate the Form beyond the shadows. There are some things we cannot know except through direct, unmediated experience... some aspects of meaning that can never be understood until the veils between us and reality are lifted.