Malacandra is the fictional planet central to C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet. In the novel, it is the name used for Mars by its inhabitants.
The 1938 book follows philologist Elwin Ransom after he is abducted and taken to Malacandra. Ransom’s knowledge of language becomes crucial as he encounters several intelligent species and learns that the planet is not the primitive world he expected.
Lewis’s space fiction uses planetary settings to examine morality, colonial assumptions, and humanity’s spiritual condition. In the trilogy’s invented terminology, Earth is called Thulcandra, the “silent planet,” because it has become cut off from the wider harmony of the solar system.