That Hideous Strength, circa 2026

Columnist Ross Douthat’s run as host of the New York Times’ Interesting Times podcast has, sadly, ended after a little over a year behind the microphone. I listened to each episode with alternating fascination and alarm as Douthat and guests covered topics ranging from AI to psychedelics to foreign policy to the existence of God. While some of those guests were conservative Christians, Ross deserves journalistic sainthood for another group of guests whose beliefs and obsessions are, to put it mildly, dystopian—yet also eerily familiar. As I remarked on X, Interesting Times frequently felt like Douthat was politely interviewing the villains from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.

So many Interesting Times guests not only echoed the ideas of bad guys in Lewis’s tale of high technology and medieval angelology, but sometimes nearly reproduced their words. Douthat, with the patience of Job, listened to all of this, responding with challenges and penetrating questions.

Take last June’s episode with Peter Thiel, entrepreneur, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, and self-professed transhumanist. At a key moment, Thiel hesitated to say whether he wanted the human race to survive. He finally allowed that it should, but maybe in a disembodied, undying form, as envisioned by transhumanists: a “radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body.” This, he told Douthat, is far more radical than transgenderism, which only changes clothes, hormones, and genitals. “We want more transformation than that. … We want you to be able to change your heart, and change your mind, and change your whole body.”

Compare this with the ideas of Filostrato, a physiologist from That Hideous Strength, the third book in the Space Trilogy. Filostrato is a member of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) who says organic life has done its job in producing the human mind and can now be discarded. Humans instead must “Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals,” and “Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.” The result will be a “New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature.”

Or consider Douthat’s interview last August with Noor Siddiqui, founder of the embryo screening and IVF firm, Orchid. Siddiqui wants to sever the link between sex and reproduction, reserving sex just “for fun” and leaving the production of disease-free, optimized babies exclusively through her company’s patented process. When Douthat pressed her logic, Siddiqui conceded that it would have been “the responsible decision as a parent” for her grandmother to have aborted her mother, who suffered adult-onset blindness due to a genetic defect. Douthat pointed out that this meant Siddiqui, herself, would not have been born, but she seemed untroubled.

Compare these ideas with those of another character from That Hideous Strength, Lord Feverstone, also known as Dick Devine, who wants to make eugenics normal and eventually compulsory: “Man,” he says, “has got to take charge of man.” Feverstone makes it clear that by “taking charge” he means something functionally close to what Siddiqui and advocates of embryo screening have in mind: “selective breeding … biochemical conditioning … A new type of man.”

We learn later from the hero (Elwin Ransom) that a race of extraterrestrials inhabiting the moon has already put these technologies into practice. Instead of making babies the old-fashioned way, Lunar couples please their pornified tastes with robotic copies of each other. “Their real children,” Ransom says, “they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”

Several of Douthat’s guests even claimed to have contacted higher beings. Ezra Klein, for instance, described mystical encounters with “God” he had while taking ayahuasca, and German entrepreneur and investor Christian Angermayer recounted similar experiences. He told Douthat last June that psychedelics “allow you to communicate with the divine, opening a door to the infinite,” and claimed that he meets not only “God,” but “entities” every time he trips. When Douthat asked how he knows these aren’t “misleading entities,” Angermayer replied that when he talks to them about his sincere problems, “He/she/it” always answers.

This spiritual naivety mirrors the way members of Lewis’ N.I.C.E. commune with entities they call “macrobes,” whom they take to be wise, ascended beings but are actually demons. At one point, protagonist Mark Studdock asks villain Augustus Frost whether these macrobes might not be friendly toward humanity. Frost dismisses the question as a holdover from Mark’s religious upbringing that “has no meaning except on the level of the crudest popular thought.”

In his final episode last week, Douthat spoke with tech entrepreneur (noticing a pattern?) Bryan Johnson, founder of the “Don’t Die” movement. Johnson has made micromanaging his health to stay alive indefinitely a philosophy—one he has grown increasingly fanatical about after his own psychedelic séances. When Douthat questioned whether structuring one’s life around avoiding death is good given the prevalence of deathless villains throughout fiction, Johnson bit the bullet: “People make these connections all the time: Dracula, Dorian Gray, or Prometheus. Basically, I say yes to all of it.”

My mind went to another fictional Un-man, Edward Weston in Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in Lewis’ trilogy. Weston professes to worship a life-force he equates with God and considers “greater than any system of morality.” His hope is to place man “forever beyond the reach of death,” an obsession that ultimately leads him to volunteer as a “vessel” for this life-force, which in Perelandra turns out to be … Satan.

Douthat actually points Johnson to a different Lewis book, The Magician’s Nephew, the first volume in The Chronicles of Narnia series. In it, the Empress Jadis steals an apple of immortality and finds both her heart’s desire and despair.

These were just a few of the hair-raising parallels between the ideas of Interesting Times guests and Space Trilogy villains. That these men and women are not fringe cranks but powerful cultural influencers shows just how prescient Lewis was when he published his story in 1945. He foresaw the arrival of newly updated eugenics, transhumanism, the quest for immortality without Christ, and even the way science and the supernatural would blur together.

His tale’s uncanny relevance is a reminder that we face the same temptation as Adam and Eve to gain knowledge and godhood by forbidden means. We wrestle not against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12) but against a hideous strength, and it turns out all it takes is a few polite questions to unmask that strength, which is at work in the dystopian worldviews shaping our times. It’s all a powerful modern parable, right out of N.I.C.E. 

Ross, we will be watching to see what your new work on 60 Minutes brings.