In C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, the planet visited in Out of the Silent Planet is Malacandra.
Published in 1938, Out of the Silent Planet follows the philologist Elwin Ransom after he is kidnapped and taken aboard a spacecraft. The destination is Malacandra, a planet whose inhabitants have their own languages, cultures, and moral order. Ransom eventually learns that Earth is known there as Thulcandra, the “silent planet.”
The novel combines planetary adventure with Lewis’s interest in language, theology, and the nature of civilization. Its imagined societies challenge the assumption that human beings represent the highest form of rational or moral life.
Malacandra is sometimes confused with Perelandra, the setting of the trilogy’s second volume, published in 1943. Thulcandra is another source of confusion: that name refers to Earth in the fictional cosmology, while Malacandra is the alien world Ransom visits in the first novel.