What is the name of C.S. Lewis’s 1938 science-fiction novel featuring the planet Malacandra?

Out of the Silent Planet is C.S. Lewis’s 1938 science-fiction novel featuring the planet Malacandra.

The book follows Elwin Ransom, a philologist who is abducted and taken aboard a spacecraft to Malacandra. The planet is later identified with Mars, although Lewis uses a fictional name and builds an imaginative culture around it. Ransom discovers that Earth is known as Thulcandra, the silent planet, because it has become isolated from the wider harmony of the solar system.

Out of the Silent Planet is the first volume of Lewis’s Space Trilogy. It combines planetary adventure with theological and philosophical ideas, including questions about language, colonialism, rationality, and humanity’s moral condition. The book’s setting and terminology distinguish it from Lewis’s medieval fantasy and children’s fiction.

The two sequel novels are Perelandra, published in 1943, and That Hideous Strength, published in 1945. Readers sometimes identify the whole trilogy by the title of its first book, but Out of the Silent Planet refers specifically to the 1938 novel and not to the series as a whole.