Which C.S. Lewis novel opens his Ransom Trilogy with a journey to Mars?

Out of the Silent Planet opens C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy with a journey to Mars. The novel was published in 1938 and follows Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist who is abducted and taken to the planet Mars, known in the story as Malacandra.

The book combines planetary adventure with theological and philosophical speculation. Ransom encounters intelligent beings and learns that Earth is regarded as “the silent planet,” a world cut off from the harmony found elsewhere in the solar system.

The trilogy continues with Perelandra, published in 1943, and That Hideous Strength, published in 1945. Some sources use the title Space Trilogy, while others call it the Ransom Trilogy. Voyage to Venus is an earlier working title associated with the second book, not the first.