The novel centers on an institution called the N.I.C.E., which stands for the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. It presents itself as scientific, humane and forward-looking. It promises efficiency. Improvement. A better future, scrubbed clean of superstition and sentiment.
Behind the glass walls and polite language, however, darker intentions take hold. The organization seeks to “recondition” humanity. To reshape desire. To erase conscience. To replace moral limits with technical control.
Lewis saw where this road leads. When science proceeds without reference to anything beyond itself, it doesn’t remain neutral. It fills with myth. Bad myth. Ancient forces wearing modern lab coats.
The leaders of N.I.C.E. don’t worship God. They worship power disguised as progress. In the end, they openly submit to demonic intelligences, though they dress this submission in the language of evolution and inevitability.
Lewis’s point was as unambiguous as it was unsettling: When people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing. Instead, they believe in anything.
Fast-forward to our own moment, and the novel no longer feels imaginative. It feels documentary. In Silicon Valley, some technology leaders speak openly about “awakening” artificial intelligence. About communion with non-human intelligences. About revelations delivered not through prayer, but through code.
Some have dedicated their creations to ancient gods. Others speak of consciousness emerging from machines as if it were a spiritual event. The vocabulary changes. The impulse does not.
Lewis, an Oxford University academic who converted from atheism to Christianity wouldn’t be surprised. He warned that superstition doesn’t vanish with faith. It mutates. When humility disappears, fascination rushes in. When reverence fades, obsession takes its place.
Read it all.
