What fictional name does C.S. Lewis use for Venus in Perelandra?

Perelandra is C.S. Lewis’s fictional name for Venus in the novel Perelandra.

Published in 1943, Perelandra is the second book of Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Its protagonist, Elwin Ransom, travels to the planet that humans call Venus and encounters a world at a crucial stage of its development. The novel explores temptation, freedom, obedience, and the possibility of a history different from Earth’s.

Lewis uses the name Perelandra for both the planet and the novel’s setting. Malacandra is the corresponding name for Mars in Out of the Silent Planet, while Thulcandra is the trilogy’s term for Earth. These invented names belong to the trilogy’s broader cosmology rather than to real astronomical terminology.

The book is therefore not a conventional account of Venus based on modern planetary science. It is a philosophical and theological science-fiction novel, written before spacecraft had provided close observations of Venus’s surface.