What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1943 novel featuring the planet Malacandra?

C.S. Lewis’s 1943 novel featuring the planet Malacandra was Out of the Silent Planet. It is the first volume of Lewis’s Space Trilogy, a science-fiction series concerned with morality, language, and humanity’s place in the universe.

The protagonist, Elwin Ransom, is abducted from Earth and taken to Malacandra, a planet that humans commonly call Mars. There he encounters intelligent species and learns that the planet is not the primitive, hostile world imagined by his kidnappers. Lewis uses the adventure to challenge assumptions about colonialism, technological power, and human superiority.

The next books in the trilogy are Perelandra, published in 1943, and That Hideous Strength, published in 1945. Malacandra is therefore central to the first novel, while Perelandra is the name Lewis gives to Venus in the second. The series is sometimes called the Ransom Trilogy because Ransom remains its principal human character.