Out of the Silent Planet

Out of the Silent Planet is a science fiction novel by the British writer C. S. Lewis, first published in 1938 by John Lane, The Bodley Head. Two sequels appeared in 1943 and 1945, completing what is known as his Space Trilogy, and this is the first of them.

Dr Elwin Ransom is a philologist who enjoys walking in the English countryside and is looking for somewhere to stay when he is taken by two men and put aboard a spacecraft. He arrives on Malacandra, the planet humans call Mars, escapes the people who brought him, and is sheltered by three of the planet's species, each with its own language and its own account of the world.

Lewis wrote the book as fiction rather than as an argument, and the planet's inhabited order is set against the isolation of Earth, which the other worlds call the silent planet. Its interests are language, hierarchy and what a human being looks like to those who have never met one, and the two later volumes take the same character further out.