CS Lewis (Beyond the wardrobe, G2, 20 November) has not often been given credit for the fact that from his science fiction (1938-45) to The Four Loves (1960) he was a sustained critic of western imperialist attitudes to the universe. He turned the fantasy writing of HG Wells on its head in relation to suspicion of the alien and different. It is his western scientist Ransom and Devine, the business man, who are prepared to cut moral comers and treat planetary dwellers as illiterate simpletons to be shot or destroyed, not recognising their superior moral nature and understanding. "Large areas of the world will not hear us till we have publicly disowned much of our past," he wrote. He made clear he was not attacking science, but systems of command and obedience without a heart, and power without a sense of responsibility, and was candid enough to admit his own personal temptation. So Rowan Williams is right to see him as "a brilliant diagnostician of self-deception".
K Scoular Datta
Oxford
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