For those who haven't read it, the book is a curious hybrid, mixing the anti-totalitarian style of dystopia familiar from Lewis' contemporaries such as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley with a blend of supernaturalism and science fiction that anticipates Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time," among other works. (Lewis' preferred subtitle for "That Hideous Strength" was "A Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups.")

The story introduces a near-future Britain falling under the sway of a scientistic technocracy, the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE), which looks like the World State from Huxley's "Brave New World" in embryo. But as one of the characters is drawn closer to NICE's inner ring, he discovers that the most powerful technocrats are supernaturalists, endeavoring to raise the dead, to contact dark supernatural entities and even to revive a slumbering Merlin to aid them in their plans.

I'll say no more about the plot mechanics except to observe that they boldly operate in the risky zone between the sublime and the ridiculous. But just from that sketch, I'll draw out a couple of points about the book's interest for our own times.

First, the idea that technological ambition and occult magic can have a closer-than-expected relationship feels quite relevant to the strange era we've entered recently — where Silicon Valley rationalists are turning "postrationalist," where hallucinogen-mediated spiritual experiences are being touted as self-care for the cognoscenti, where UFO sightings and alien encounters are back on the cultural menu, where people talk about innovations in artificial intelligence the way they might talk about a golem or a djinn.

The idea that deep in the core of, say, some important digital-age enterprise there might be a group of people trying to commune with the spirit world doesn't seem particularly fanciful at this point. Although like some of the characters in "That Hideous Strength," these spiritualists would probably be telling themselves that they're just doing high-level science, maybe puncturing an alternative dimension or unlocking the hidden potential of the human mind.