Malacandra is the fictional planet inhabited by the villain Weston in C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet.
Published in 1938, the novel follows Cambridge philologist Elwin Ransom after he is abducted and taken to Malacandra. Lewis uses the planet to imagine intelligent species, moral communities, and a civilization not shaped by the violence and exploitation that Ransom associates with Earth.
In the novel’s terminology, Earth is called Thulcandra, the “silent planet,” because it is cut off from the wider harmony of intelligent life. Malacandra is Lewis’s name for Mars, while Perelandra is his name for Venus in the second book of the Space Trilogy.
The names can be easy to mix up because the trilogy uses both invented planetary names and recognizable astronomical identities. Malacandra belongs to the first novel; Perelandra belongs to its sequel, published in 1943.