Malacandra is the fictional planet inhabited by the Oyarsa in Out of the Silent Planet.
C.S. Lewis introduced Malacandra in Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938. The novel follows the philologist Elwin Ransom after he is abducted from Earth and taken to the planet by two human conspirators. On Malacandra, he encounters several intelligent species and learns that the planet has its own moral and spiritual order.
The term Oyarsa refers to the ruling spiritual being associated with a planet. Maleldil is the supreme divine figure in the trilogy’s cosmology, while Earth is called Thulcandra, the silent planet because its Oyarsa is separated from the others.
Malacandra is sometimes confused with Perelandra, the setting of the trilogy’s second novel. In astronomical terms, Lewis’s Malacandra is associated with Mars, but the fictional name and its inhabitants belong to Lewis’s imaginative world rather than to modern planetary science.