Out of the Silent Planet

The first of Lewis's three Ransom novels, published by John Lane at The Bodley Head in London in 1938. Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist on a walking tour, is drugged and kidnapped by the physicist Weston and the profiteer Devine and carried by spaceship to Malacandra, the planet Mars. Escaping his captors, he lives among the planet's three rational species and comes to know a world that has never fallen, governed under God by its angelic ruler, its Oyarsa; Earth, he learns, is the silent planet, cut off because its own Oyarsa is bent. The novel turns the conventions of the interplanetary romance against the ambitions of scientific imperialism that Weston represents. It arose from an agreement between Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien that each would write the kind of story they wished to read. Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945) continue the sequence.