From Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction

by Brian W. Aldiss with David Wingrove (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986), 188-189.

Aldous Huxley was the grandson of the great T.H. Huxley, the supporter of Darwin who became Wells’s instructor late in life. He achieved at least three reputations, as a cynic in the day of the Bright Young Things, as a mystical philosopher, and, after his death, as a sort of godfather of the hippies. He was erudite, saintly, and a man of marvelous gifts, which showed through more in his life, possibly, than in his books. . . .

Huxley died on 22nd November 1963, the day that President J.F. Kennedy was assassinated. Almost within twenty-four hours, Professor C. S.Lewis also was dead. He died in Headington, Oxford.*

Like Huxley, Lewis was a seeker after truth; he found its illuminations within the Christian belief. Like Huxley, he called forth affection and respect from all who met him, even those opposed to his views. Again like Huxley, he was drawn to science fiction as a medium of expression.

With the possible exception of Huxley, C. S. Lewis was the most respected champion of science fiction the modern genre has known.

Clive Staples Lewis (born 1898) spent most of his working life at either Oxford or Cambridge. He served in the infantry in the First World War, and was wounded in 1918. He was elected Fellow ant Tutor in English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925, a position he held until 1954. It was during his Oxford period that he wrote the trilogy which has earned him an enviable place in science fiction history, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945).