What is the name of C.S. Lewis’s space-travel novel published in 1938?

Out of the Silent Planet is C.S. Lewis’s space-travel novel, published in 1938. It follows the philologist Elwin Ransom after he is abducted and taken to the planet Mars, called Malacandra in the story.

The novel begins the science-fiction sequence later known as the Space Trilogy. Ransom encounters intelligent species on Malacandra and learns that Earth, or Thulcandra, is regarded as the silent planet because it has become isolated from the wider community of inhabited worlds.

Lewis wrote the book partly in response to what he considered spiritually bleak or morally limited trends in modern science fiction. The work combines adventure with questions about language, colonialism, human nature, and Christian theology.

Perelandra, published in 1943, is the second volume, and That Hideous Strength, published in 1945, is the third. Out of the Silent Planet is therefore the series opener, not merely a later installment in Lewis’s fiction.