Out of the Silent Planet
Out of the Silent Planet is the first novel of a science fiction trilogy written by C. S. Lewis, sometimes referred to as the Space Trilogy or Ransom Trilogy.Warning: Plot details follow.
The protagonist, British university professor Elwin Ransom, is kidnapped by the novel's two villains, Weston and Devine, and taken to the planet Malacandra. Once there, he escapes from his captors and briefly wanders alone before encountering the natives. He ultimately finds that the planet is home to three intelligent races --- a race of agrarian poets (the Hrossa), a race of rationalists (the Seroni) and a race of technologists (the Pfifltriggi), along with a mysterious class of nearly-invisible beings that do not seem to be restricted to any one planet (the Eldila). Ransom, an expert in philology, is able to learn the language of his hosts, the Hrossa. Ultimately he learns that the planet is in fact Mars, and that its civilization is far older than that of the Earth, the name of which in the Hross language translates as "silent planet."
Lewis, an adult convert from atheism to Christianity, uses Out of the Silent Planet (along with the two successive novels in the trilogy, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength) to convey philosophical ideas with Biblical foundations: in this novel, the idea of an ancient world that never experienced a fall from grace, in contrast to the history of our own world. The races of Malacandra have lived in complete peace for millions of years in a kind of second-chance Garden of Eden and find Ransom's descriptions of life on Earth difficult to comprehend. Lewis's description of the planet Mars is not particularly accurate from a purely factual standpoint (Lewis himself said as much in his essay "On Science Fiction") but is a poetic vision of what an innocent, unspoiled world might be like.
The cosmology described in all three books—in which each planet in the Solar System has a sort of guardian angel, with those of Mars and Venus somewhat resembling the corresponding gods from classical mythology—derives from Lewis's interest in medieval beliefs. A central concern of his book The Discarded Image is the way medieval authors borrowed concepts from pre-Christian religion and science and attempted to reconcile them with Christianity, and the lack of a clear distinction between natural and supernatural phenomena (or between science fiction and fantasy) in medieval thought. The Space Trilogy also expands on Lewis's essay "Religion and Rocketry", which argues that as long as humanity remains flawed and sinful, our exploration of other planets will tend to do them more harm than good.
Ransom, who is also the main character of Perelandra - he is a secondary character in That Hideous Strength - appears very similar to Lewis himself: university professor, expert in languages and medieval literature, unmarried (Lewis did not marry until his fifties), wounded in World War I and with no living relatives except for one sibling. Lewis, however, apparently intended for Ransom to be partially patterned after his friend and fellow Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien, since Lewis is a character-narrator in the frame tale for Perelandra.