Ransom is the surname of philologist Elwin Ransom, the central protagonist of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.
The trilogy begins with Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938. Ransom is abducted and taken to Malacandra, a planet that humans call Mars. In Perelandra, published in 1943, he travels to another world and confronts a new moral crisis. That Hideous Strength, published in 1945, returns the action to Earth and broadens the conflict into a struggle involving science, power, and spiritual corruption.
Lewis modeled aspects of Ransom on his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, including the character’s academic identity, but Ransom is not Tolkien under another name. The trilogy combines planetary adventure with Christian ideas and philosophical questions.
The books are sometimes called the Cosmic Trilogy or Ransom Trilogy. They are distinct from Lewis’s Narnia novels, which are children’s fantasies set in a separate fictional universe.