An argument between Jane and Mark shows how their marriage is deteriorating. Dimble leads her to seek counsel from a Miss Ironwood who lives in the Manor in the nearby town of St Anne's. Dimble, the wife of one of her former tutors, who is being evicted due to sale of land to the N.I.C.E. Mark's wife Jane (a PhD student at the university) has suffered a peculiar nightmare involving a severed head. (It is gradually revealed that Feverstone is the new title of Richard Devine, who accompanied Professor Weston on the trip to Mars in Out of the Silent Planet, but not on the trip to Venus in Perelandra.) insider called Lord Feverstone proposes a possible post for Mark at the Institute.

The sale is controversial since the land in question (Bragdon Wood) is an ancient woodland believed to be the resting place of Merlin. The fellows of Bracton are debating the sale of a portion of college land to the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), whose staff already includes some college faculty. Mark Studdock is a young academic who has just become a Senior Fellow in sociology at Bracton College in the University of Edgestow.

The novel, written during the final period of World War II, takes place at an undetermined year 'after the end of the war'. The couplet in question, ' The shadow of that hyddeous strength, sax myle and more it is of length', refers to the Tower of Babel. The novel's title is taken from a poem written by David Lyndsay in 1555, Ane Dialog betuix Experience and ane Courteour, also known as The Monarche. In the foreword, Lewis states that the novel's point is the same as that of his 1943 non-fiction work The Abolition of Man, which argues that there are natural laws and objective values that education should teach children to recognise. The novel was heavily influenced by the writing of Lewis's friend and fellow Inkling Charles Williams, and is markedly dystopian in style. The story involves an ostensibly scientific institute, the N.I.C.E., which is a front for sinister supernatural forces. Yet unlike the principal events of those two novels, the story takes place on Earth rather than elsewhere in the Solar System. The events of this novel follow those of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra (also titled Voyage to Venus) and once again feature the philologist Elwin Ransom. Lewis, the final book in Lewis's theological science fiction Space Trilogy. That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups is a 1945 novel by C.

That hideous strength book