Silent Planet

Lewis, Clive Staples. Out of the Silent Planet (1938)

The Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, by Lewis (1898-1963), is the first novel of a science fiction trilogy, sometimes called the Ransom Trilogy after its main character. Out of the Silent Planet (1938) is set mostly on Mars; Perelandra (1943), mostly on Venus; and That Hideous Strength (1945), on Earth. A fourth book, The Dark Tower (1977) was published posthumously and purporting to be a manuscript that Lewis had left unfinished at the time of his death. Some think it is a forgery.

These novels express a deeply Christian view, with much dialogue and narrative about right and wrong, good and evil. An adult convert from atheism to Christianity (see his autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), Lewis uses fiction to explore Christian philosophy. Out of the Silent Planet describes an unfallen world. The creatures of Malacandra live in peace.

The cosmology of all three books—in which the Oyéresu of Mars and Venus somewhat resemble the corresponding gods from classical mythology, and the silent Oyarsa of Thulcandra (Earth) resembles Satan—derives from Lewis’s interest in medieval beliefs.

The “Pedestrian,” a philologist named Elwin Ransom, is the protagonist of the first two novels and an important character in the third. Like Lewis, he is a university professor expert in languages and medieval literature, and unmarried and has been wounded in World War I. Lewis modelled Ransom partly on his friend and fellow Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien, a member of the Inklings, a writer’s group in Oxford which also included Owen Barfield and Charles Williams.