Mars is called Malacandra in C.S. Lewis’s novel Out of the Silent Planet. The 1938 science-fiction book follows the philologist Elwin Ransom after he is kidnapped and taken into space.
In Lewis’s fictional cosmology, Malacandra is the name used by its inhabitants for Mars. Ransom learns that the planet contains several intelligent species and that its societies are not organized around the violent human assumptions brought from Earth. The novel uses planetary travel to explore language, morality, colonialism, and humanity’s place in the universe.
Out of the Silent Planet is the first volume of Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Its two successors are Perelandra, published in 1943, and That Hideous Strength, published in 1945. Lewis drew on contemporary interest in space travel, but the book is not a conventional scientific prediction. “Malacandra” is a fictional name within the story, while Mars is the planet’s familiar astronomical name.