Which C.S. Lewis novel features the interplanetary traveler Elwin Ransom?

Out of the Silent Planet is the C.S. Lewis novel featuring the interplanetary traveler Elwin Ransom.

Published in 1938, Out of the Silent Planet is the first book of Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Ransom, a Cambridge philologist, is kidnapped and taken to Malacandra, the planet humans call Mars. The journey introduces Lewis’s imaginative treatment of language, morality, science, and humanity’s place in the universe.

The novel was influenced partly by Lewis’s conversations with J.R.R. Tolkien, especially their shared interest in recovering imaginative and moral possibilities from modern literature. Lewis used the science-fiction setting to explore spiritual and philosophical questions rather than writing a purely technical space adventure.

The two later books are Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Readers sometimes identify Ransom primarily with the trilogy as a whole, but his first appearance is specifically in Out of the Silent Planet, which establishes his profession and the planetary setting.