C.S. Lewis’s novel Perelandra is set mainly on the planet Venus, which is called Perelandra in the story. It is the second volume of Lewis’s Space Trilogy and follows the philologist Elwin Ransom.
Published in 1943, the novel sends Ransom to a world covered largely by ocean, with floating islands and a newly created human society. He encounters the Green Lady, who occupies a role comparable to Eve in the biblical account of humanity’s beginnings. A tempter seeks to persuade her to disobey the divine command governing her world.
The novel is not an attempt at realistic planetary science. Lewis wrote it as theological and imaginative fiction, drawing on Christian ideas about temptation, free will, innocence, and cosmic conflict. Perelandra is sometimes confused with Malacandra, the name Lewis gives to Mars in the first Space Trilogy book, Out of the Silent Planet.