Elwin Ransom is the fictional scholar who stars in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.
Ransom is the central character of Out of the Silent Planet, the trilogy’s first novel, published in 1938. He is a philologist who is abducted and taken to Mars, known in the story by the name Malacandra. His knowledge of language becomes important as he encounters civilizations unlike Earth’s.
Ransom returns in Perelandra, published in 1943, and That Hideous Strength, published in 1945. The three novels combine planetary adventure, mythic ideas, Christian theology, and criticism of scientific or political power used without moral restraint.
Readers sometimes confuse Ransom with characters from Lewis’s other books. Orual is the narrator of Till We Have Faces, Mark Studdock is a principal character in That Hideous Strength, and Digory Kirke belongs to the Narnia stories. Ransom’s trilogy is therefore distinct from both Lewis’s children’s fantasy and his retellings of myth.