Venus is the setting of C.S. Lewis’s second Ransom Trilogy novel, Perelandra.
Published in 1943, Perelandra follows Elwin Ransom after the events of Out of the Silent Planet. Ransom travels to the planet Perelandra, Lewis’s fictional name for Venus, where he encounters a newly created world and a conflict involving temptation and obedience.
The novel uses Venus in a way that differs sharply from modern scientific knowledge of the planet. Lewis wrote before spacecraft observations revealed Venus as an extremely hot world with a dense carbon-dioxide atmosphere. His fictional Venus is instead a lush, oceanic planet with floating islands and a habitable environment.
The trilogy’s third novel, That Hideous Strength, returns to Earth rather than continuing the same planetary setting. The sequence is also known as the Space Trilogy, and its protagonist is Elwin Ransom.