Elwin Ransom is the fictional planetologist who appears in all three books of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.
Ransom is introduced in Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938. He is a Cambridge academic who is abducted and taken to Mars, called Malacandra in the novel. His knowledge of languages and his moral judgment become crucial to the story.
He returns in Perelandra, published in 1943, where he travels to Venus, called Perelandra. In That Hideous Strength, published in 1945, he remains an important figure while the conflict moves to Earth and involves a dangerous scientific organization.
The character’s surname is sometimes confused with Mark Studdock, a central figure in the third novel, or with Orual, the narrator of Lewis’s separate mythological novel Till We Have Faces. Ransom is the trilogy’s recurring protagonist.