In C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Perelandra is the planet Venus.
Perelandra is also the title of the trilogy’s second novel, published in 1943. The story returns to Elwin Ransom, who travels to a world covered largely by ocean and floating islands. Within the novel’s fictional cosmology, Perelandra corresponds to Venus, just as Malacandra in the first book corresponds to Mars.
Lewis does not present Venus as a realistic astronomical setting in the modern scientific sense. Instead, he reshapes the planet into a mythic and theological environment where a new civilization faces a crisis resembling humanity’s temptation and fall. The imaginative transformation is central to the book’s purpose.
The title can therefore cause two kinds of confusion: Perelandra is both the invented name of the planet and the name of the novel about it. It is not the name of a star or a separate fictional solar system. Ransom’s journey remains connected to the Solar System familiar from Lewis’s time.