In C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, the alien planet is called Malacandra.
The 1938 novel follows Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist who is abducted and taken into space. He reaches Malacandra, a planet that humans on Earth know as Mars. The inhabitants use the name Malacandra and include several intelligent species with distinct cultures and languages.
The book is the first volume of Lewis’s Space Trilogy, followed by Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Lewis uses the story to explore language, morality, colonialism, and the possibility that humanity’s assumptions about the universe are deeply mistaken.
A frequent mix-up is between Malacandra and Perelandra. Malacandra is the setting of the first novel, while Perelandra is the Venus-like world visited in the second. Thulcandra is the series’ name for Earth.