Which C.S. Lewis novel opens his Space Trilogy?

Out of the Silent Planet opens C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.

The novel was published in 1938 and follows Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist who is abducted and taken to Mars. Lewis calls the planet Malacandra, and the book explores language, colonial exploitation, science, morality, and humanity’s place in the cosmos.

The second volume, Perelandra, appeared in 1943, followed by That Hideous Strength in 1945. Although the books share characters and ideas, each has a distinct setting and narrative emphasis. The trilogy is also sometimes called the Ransom Trilogy after its protagonist.

Out of the Silent Planet was influenced partly by Lewis’s conversations with J.R.R. Tolkien about the scarcity of good imaginative fiction involving space travel. Its title reflects the novel’s view of Earth as spiritually isolated from a wider inhabited universe.