Ransom was the surname of C.S. Lewis’s fictional academic protagonist Elwin Ransom.
Elwin Ransom is the central character of Lewis’s Space Trilogy, also called the Ransom Trilogy. He is a Cambridge philologist whose adventures begin when he is taken to Malacandra in Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938.
Ransom returns in Perelandra, where he travels to the fictional Venus, and in That Hideous Strength, which brings the conflict back to Earth. Across the trilogy, his scholarship, moral courage, and linguistic knowledge shape how he responds to alien cultures and spiritual danger.
The character’s name can be confusing because “Ransom” is also the title of a separate 1955 novel by Lewis’s friend and fellow Inkling, J.R.R. Tolkien? It is not: Tolkien did not write a novel titled Ransom. In Lewis’s trilogy, Ransom is specifically the surname of Elwin Ransom, not the series title itself.