Perelandra is C.S. Lewis’s novel set mainly on the fictional planet Perelandra.
Published in 1943, it is the second volume of Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Elwin Ransom travels to Perelandra, a planet Lewis also calls Venus, where he encounters a newly emerging civilization and a conflict involving temptation, obedience, and the future of intelligent life. The story uses an alien setting to explore theological and philosophical questions.
Perelandra is sometimes confused with Out of the Silent Planet, the trilogy’s opening book, because both feature Ransom and journeys to other worlds. It is also distinct from That Hideous Strength, the final volume, which returns much of its action to Earth. Lewis’s planetary names do not simply reproduce scientific descriptions of Venus and Mars; they belong to the imaginative cosmology of the trilogy, in which different worlds have their own histories, languages, and spiritual conditions.