In C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom is taken to Malacandra, Lewis’s fictional name for Mars.
The novel follows Elwin Ransom, a philologist who is kidnapped and transported into space. After escaping his captors, he encounters intelligent species and learns that Malacandra is not the threatening world his kidnappers described. Lewis uses the setting to combine planetary adventure with Christian and philosophical themes.
The book appeared in 1938 and began Lewis’s Space Trilogy. In the trilogy’s terminology, Earth is called Thulcandra, the “silent planet,” because it has become spiritually isolated. Malacandra is therefore not the same place as Perelandra, which is the setting of the second novel, published in 1943. The character’s surname is often written Ransom, not “Ransome.”