Mars is the planet visited in C.S. Lewis’s first science-fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet.
Published in 1938, the novel follows the philologist Elwin Ransom, who is kidnapped and taken aboard a spacecraft to Malacandra. Malacandra is Lewis’s fictional name for Mars. On the planet, Ransom encounters several intelligent species and learns that human assumptions about civilization and morality are deeply flawed.
The book is the first volume of Lewis’s Space Trilogy, also called the Cosmic Trilogy. Perelandra followed in 1943, and That Hideous Strength completed the sequence in 1945. The trilogy blends planetary adventure with theological and philosophical themes.
Mars is not presented as a scientifically realistic version of the planet known today. Lewis wrote before modern space exploration had transformed public knowledge of Mars, so the novel’s imagined landscape and inhabitants belong to an earlier tradition of planetary romance.