Elwin Ransom is the central human character in Out of the Silent Planet.
Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938, follows Dr. Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist who is abducted and taken to the planet Mars. In the novel, Mars is known as Malacandra, and Ransom’s knowledge of languages becomes essential to his survival and understanding of the planet’s inhabitants.
The book begins C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Its science fiction combines planetary travel with questions about language, morality, civilization, and humanity’s place in the universe. The novel was partly shaped by Lewis’s conversations with J.R.R. Tolkien about the possibilities of imaginative literature.
Ransom should not be confused with Mark Studdock, the protagonist of the trilogy’s final novel, That Hideous Strength. Orual is the narrator of Till We Have Faces, a separate myth-based novel.