Elwin Ransom travels to the fictional planet Malacandra in C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet.
In the 1938 novel, Malacandra is Lewis’s name for Mars. Ransom, a Cambridge philologist, is abducted by two men and taken into space, where he encounters intelligent species and discovers a civilization very different from Earth. His knowledge of language becomes essential to understanding the planet and its inhabitants.
Lewis uses the setting to explore moral corruption, colonial assumptions, communication, and the possibility of intelligent life beyond Earth. The novel’s invented terminology reflects his interest in language and medieval cosmology as well as contemporary science fiction.
Malacandra is easy to confuse with Thulcandra, the name used for Earth in Lewis’s fictional universe. Perelandra is another planet and the setting of the trilogy’s second novel. Glome, by contrast, is the kingdom in Lewis’s separate novel Till We Have Faces.