Perelandra is C.S. Lewis’s retelling of the biblical story of the Fall on Venus.
Published in 1943, Perelandra is the second novel of Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Its protagonist, Elwin Ransom, travels to the planet Venus, known as Perelandra in the book. There he encounters a newly created world whose inhabitants face a moral test resembling the temptation and Fall described in Genesis.
The novel is not a simple science-fiction adaptation of Genesis. Lewis combines planetary adventure with theological argument, philosophical dialogue, and vivid descriptions of an ocean-covered world. The story’s setting allows him to imagine a civilization before its first disobedience and to ask how freedom, innocence, temptation, and obedience might operate there. That Hideous Strength, the trilogy’s third book, shifts back toward Earth and addresses the dangers of technocratic power and distorted scientific ambition.