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This anthology's brilliance is that it continues a project begun by C. S. Lewis himself. The Abolition of Man was written to explain the dangers of Modernity's trend toward abandoning a belief in objective moral values, what philosophers often call Natural Law and Lewis referred to—in order to emphasize its cultural universality—as the Tao. Among the dangers of surrendering objective values for subjective preferences, Lewis wrote, is the potential for advances in technology which would make it possible for some people to develop the ability to take control of and manipulate mankind toward their own ends. Science Fiction and The Abolition of Man is a continuation of Lewis's project because Lewis himself "sequeled'' Abolition with his own sci-fi novel, That Hideous Strength (1945) which plays out in imaginative form what Lewis argued philosophically in Abolition. The collected authors in this anthology do something similar: they read Lewis's key ideas through the imaginative explorations of modern-day film and television.
Boone succinctly summarizes the anthology's thesis in his comprehensive first chapter: "the dangers about which Lewis warned us—the dangers of science without belief in objective moral truth—are nicely illustrated in science fiction film and television'' (2). The "key ideas'' in Abolition which the anthology follows are "Men without Chests,'' "The Way,'' and "The Abolition of Man'' (9–11).
The seven essays in part I, "Men without Chests,'' explore what it means to be human. In "Monster in the Mirror,'' Mark Eckel considers technology as the chief means by which we attempt to redefine our nature by eliminating God and achieving happiness without Him through technology. In doing so, however, we simply replace God with the machines of our own creation. Lewis Pearson explores Lewis's "threefold nature of the soul'' (39) in his essay, "Vulcans without Chests.'' He finds that Star Trek's offer of the Vulcan culture (representing Lewis's idea of the "head'') in opposition of human culture (emphasizing the "belly'' or the "chest'') offers an insufficient understanding of human nature from either direction. While Pearson rightly associates the "head'' with reason and the "belly'' with the animal appetites, his emphasis on the "chest'' as emotion misses Lewis's original mark, failing to see that the "chest'' is much more than just emotion in Lewis's vision of...