What is the name of the first book in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy?

Out of the Silent Planet is the first book in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. It was published in 1938 and introduces the philologist Elwin Ransom, who is abducted and taken to the planet Mars, known in the novel as Malacandra.

The story combines planetary adventure with Lewis’s interest in language, morality, theology, and the possibility of intelligent life beyond Earth. Ransom encounters several intelligent species on Malacandra and learns that the planet’s inhabitants are not shaped by the same corruption that affects humanity.

The trilogy continues with Perelandra, published in 1943, and That Hideous Strength, published in 1945. The three novels are also called the Ransom Trilogy, after their central character. The books are sometimes grouped with science fiction, although Lewis used the genre for philosophical and religious speculation rather than technological prediction alone.

Lewis wrote the trilogy partly in response to what he saw as spiritually empty or pessimistic science fiction. Its first title therefore marks both his entrance into interplanetary fiction and the beginning of one of his most ambitious imaginative sequences.