Review of “The Shoddy Lands” (1956)
C. S. Lewis (writer).
Read in 2026.
A university professor finds himself transported to the inner world of a woman he meets only briefly.
The common criticism of this story, that Lewis stereotypifies and sexualizes the younger woman, is correct, though Mattias P. Gassman showed, in a 2026 paper, that the focalizer is clearly not Lewis and may himself be a subject of the author’s satire.
More importantly, this story is interesting because it is a very rare case of the use of fantasy to build a world that is, as the title says, shoddy, not idealized. The focalizer initially suspects it is the Hell of Christian mythology, but it barely resembles the Netherworld of The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2100–1100 BCE), much less the idealized Hell of the Divine Comedy (1320). It is totally unlike Lewis’s Narnia, being marked by the absence of enchantment. It’s a series of smart moves by Lewis to come up with this anti-wishful form of fantasy in the first place, and then to to loop it back to the usual wish-fulfilling drivers of the fantasy genre anyway, picking boring small talk as the reason for fantasizing (escapism) and picking somebody else’s wishes as the explanation for why the focalizer is so unhappy in the imaginary setting. It would have worked even better without the sexism, but the premise does require another person who is psychologically alien to the narrator, so that the narrator keeps looking in the wrong direction.
References here: Lord Foul’s Bane (1977).