Which C.S. Lewis novel begins his science-fiction trilogy with a voyage to Mars?

Out of the Silent Planet begins C.S. Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy with a voyage to Mars.

Published in 1938, the novel introduces Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist who is kidnapped and taken into space. The destination is Malacandra, Lewis’s fictional name for Mars. There Ransom encounters intelligent species and learns that Earth is known as Thulcandra, the “silent planet.”

The book was influenced by Lewis’s interest in medieval cosmology, mythology, language, and the moral consequences of modern technological ambition. Its space travel is imaginative rather than a realistic account of planetary science, and its invented vocabulary is central to the story’s world-building.

Out of the Silent Planet is sometimes confused with the second and third volumes, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Those books continue Ransom’s story but take him to Venus and back to Earth, respectively. The first novel is specifically the Mars-set opening volume.