Which C.S. Lewis novel features the space traveler Ransom and was published in 1938?

The 1938 C.S. Lewis novel featuring the space traveler Ransom is Out of the Silent Planet.

The book follows Dr. Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist who is abducted and taken to the planet Malacandra. On Earth, Malacandra is known as Mars. Ransom escapes his captors and gradually learns about the planet’s inhabitants, languages and moral order.

Out of the Silent Planet was published by John Lane in 1938. It became the first volume of Lewis’s Space Trilogy, followed by Perelandra in 1943 and That Hideous Strength in 1945. The series combines planetary adventure with theological and philosophical themes.

Ransom’s name can cause confusion because “ransom” is also an ordinary English word. In the trilogy, it is simply the protagonist’s surname. Lewis’s fictional Mars is also not a realistic astronomical portrait; it is a deliberately imagined world shaped by the author’s interest in myth, language and spiritual conflict.