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Abstract
[...]why shouldn't there be a green star, if not one visible from Earth, at least deep in space where the good ship Starplex is exploring our galaxy? Because they don't occur in nature, and this novel is a work of what is called "hard" science fiction, where the convention is that any marvels that occur should have an explanation within the framework of contemporary scientific theory however far the envelope gets pushed. [...]why don't stars cooler than Rigel but hotter than our sun look green, which would be between blue and yellow and smack in the middle of the spectrum? Because nature is not so neatly organized: in such middlerange stars all the visible colors turn out to have roughly the same intensity, making the star look white instead (white being what the human eye sees when all the colors of the rainbow are combined). [...]among its many plot threads this novel has to provide an explanation for the anomalous greenness of this star, and of a large number of other hitherto unknown green stars that are mysteriously popping up in our Milky Way and other galaxies. Lewis would spend part of the next three years preparing the last three Narnia books for publication. [...]he was also certainly busy enough with academic duties; for example, at this time he was checking the proofs for his massive volume for the Oxford History of English Literature (CL HI 288; letter to Nathan Comfort Starr dated February 3rd, 1953).