Seven months before
The Last Battle was published, C.S. Lewis had a short story appear in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was called “The Shoddy Lands,” and—believe it or not—it and another short story are key pieces in understanding what exactly is happening with poor Susan Pevensie in
The Last Battle. Our next article in the C.S. Lewis Reread is going to be about “the problem of Susan” so first, we need to take a little detour and explore these two stories.
In 1953, Lewis received a letter from a man named William Anthony Parker White. He was an author who wrote under the pen name Anthony Boucher, and he was also the editor of