Malacandra is the planet inhabited by intelligent life in C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet.
Published in 1938, Out of the Silent Planet is the first novel in Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Its protagonist, Dr. Elwin Ransom, is kidnapped and taken aboard a spacecraft to Malacandra, a planet that most readers identify with Mars. There he encounters several intelligent species and begins to understand the planet’s moral and spiritual order.
The novel uses different names from ordinary astronomy. Malacandra is the name used by its inhabitants, while Earth is called Thulcandra, the “silent planet,” because it has become isolated from the wider harmony of the solar system.
Readers often confuse Malacandra with Perelandra, which is the setting of the trilogy’s second book. Narnia belongs to a separate fantasy series. Lewis’s space fiction combines planetary adventure with theological and philosophical ideas rather than following modern hard-science conventions.