Preface through Chapter 6: Mark Studdock is recruited into the NICE, Jane begins to dream, and their marriage frays as Belbury’s soft totalitarianism starts to look like ordinary careerism. That Hideous Strength opens not with monsters, but with two people being pulled apart.

In this Mythic Mind lecture from the Fiction and Philosophy of C.S. Lewis course, Dr. Andrew Snyder (professor of philosophy and theology) tracks the early chapters where Mark, Jane, and the NICE show how progress, expertise, and institutional belonging begin to reshape what each can still see as real.

Topics include the NICE’s recruitment logic, the fracture between Mark and Jane, and how Lewis stages the first steps toward Belbury before the novel’s more overt spiritual warfare arrives.