The Time Travellers, The Dark Tower, and Ink

LEGACY READER Wendell Wagner has come up with yet another likely influence upon The Dark Tower. In Legacy 70 (Autumn 1996) Wagner (a science fiction buff) reported that whoever wrote The Dark Tower seems to have been consciously or unconsciously influenced by the films “Invaders from Mars” and “La Jetee.” Now he has come across one more: a 1964 movie called “The Time Travelers.” It’s about some experimenters who build what they think is a window on the future, but it turns out to be a door into the future instead. One of the experimenters steps through it into a very dark era and finds that he can’t get back.

Wagner realizes that for any given plot there must be a few films or books with similar themes. But he finds it interesting that the movies and books that look like precursors of The Dark Tower (“Invaders from Mars,” 1953; “La Jetee,” 1963; “The Time Travelers,” 1964; and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, 1962) are all from the fifties and the early sixties. That correlates exactly with Lindskoog’s belief that The Dark Tower was written in the 1960s. And it correlates with the fact that in 1964 Walter Hooper, an enthusiastic movie-goer, was recklessly rewriting about half of Lewis’s poems, as well as concocting the story that he had been Lewis’s longterm live-in secretary.

Ironically, Douglas Gresham (chief C. S. Lewis Pte. spokesman and defender of The Dark Tower) insists that Lewis wrote it in the late 1950s rather than 1938-39 when Walter Hooper dates it. Why would those who have been selling this forgery for 22 years as an early, immature work by Lewis suddenly claim that it is late writing by Lewis? For a very good reason indeed: because the forged manuscript was written with post-1950 ink.

Either C. S. Lewis wrote The Dark Tower in 1950s/1960s ink or Walter Hooper did, and it seems that whichever one wrote it (take your choice) borrowed ideas from recent science fiction movies.