Perelandra represents the planet Venus in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.
Perelandra, published in 1943, is the second novel of the trilogy commonly called the Ransom Trilogy. Its title refers both to the novel and to the world where most of the story takes place. In the book’s fictional cosmology, Perelandra is the name for Venus.
The protagonist, Dr. Elwin Ransom, is transported there and encounters a newly created world whose inhabitants face a temptation involving obedience, freedom, and knowledge. The planet is portrayed as lush and oceanic, very different from the hostile or lifeless Venus imagined by much earlier astronomy.
Lewis was not attempting to write a realistic account of Venus based on modern planetary science. Instead, he used the planet as a setting for a theological and philosophical drama. That distinction matters because actual Venus is a hot planet with a dense carbon-dioxide atmosphere, while Lewis’s Perelandra is an imaginative literary world.