In C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, Mars is called Malacandra.
The 1938 novel follows Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist who is abducted and taken into space. He eventually reaches Malacandra, a planet inhabited by several intelligent species. The book uses the planet’s societies and languages to explore morality, colonialism, and humanity’s place in the universe.
Lewis drew on older astronomical and mythological traditions in naming the planets, but he did not simply reproduce the familiar Roman names. Earth is called Thulcandra, meaning the “silent planet,” because it is cut off from the wider community of inhabited worlds. Mars therefore becomes Malacandra, while Venus is associated with Perelandra in the next novel.
The book begins Lewis’s Space Trilogy, followed by Perelandra in 1943 and That Hideous Strength in 1945. Readers sometimes mistake Malacandra for the name of a species or a fictional moon; in the novel it is the local name for Mars.