Malacandra is the fictional name for Mars in C.S. Lewis’s novel Out of the Silent Planet.
Published in 1938, the novel follows philologist Elwin Ransom after he is abducted and taken aboard a spacecraft. He travels to Malacandra, a planet inhabited by several intelligent species and presented through a richly developed invented vocabulary and cosmology.
Lewis’s fictional planetary names can be easy to confuse. Malacandra is Mars, while Perelandra is the name Lewis gives to Venus in the second novel of the trilogy. Thulcandra is the name used for Earth, which the inhabitants of the other worlds regard as the “silent planet.”
The novel combines science fiction, philology, Christian themes, and planetary adventure. Its setting is not a literal astronomical description of Mars, but a deliberately imaginative world built around Lewis’s ideas about language, morality, and humanity.