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Out of the Silent Planet is a novel written by C.S. Lewis. Released in 1938, it is the first novel in Lewis' Space Trilogy and tells of a scientist being abducted and brought to Mars.
Characters[]
- Dr. Elwin Ransom
- Edward Rolles Weston
- Dick Devine
rest to be added
Publisher's summary[]
From C.S. Lewis, the acclaimed author of The Chronicles of Narnia , comes the first book in the classic science fiction Space Trilogy following the resourceful Dr. Ransom as he is abducted and taken by spaceship to Mars.
Written during the dark hours immediately before and during World War II, C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, of which Out of the Silent Planet is the first volume, stands alongside such works as Albert Camus’s The Plague and George Orwell’s 1984 as a timeless classic, beloved by succeeding generations as much for the sheer wonder of its storytelling as for the significance of its moral concerns.
While searching for a place to rest for the night, Dr. Elwin Ransom is abducted by a megalomaniacal physicist and his accomplice and taken to the red planet of Malacandra (Mars) as a human sacrifice for the alien creatures that live there. Once on the planet, however, Ransom eludes his captors, risking his life and his chances of returning to Earth, becoming a stranger in a land that is enchanting in its difference from Earth and instructive in its similarity.
First published in 1943, Out of the Silent Planet remains a magnificent and suspenseful tour de force in which epic battles are fought between the forces of light and those of darkness. It is the incredible beginning to C.S. Lewis’s spectacular Space Trilogy, which also includes Perelandra and That Hideous Strength .
Summary[]
While on a walking tour, the philologist Elwin Ransom is drugged and taken on board a spacecraft bound for a planet called Malacandra. His abductors are Devine, a former college acquaintance, and the scientist Weston.
Wonder and excitement relieve his anguish at being kidnapped, but he is put on his guard when he overhears his captors discussing their plans to turn him over to the inhabitants of Malacandra as a sacrifice. The scientist, Edward Rolles Weston, seeking to colonize Malacandra as a way to preserve the human species, and the entrepreneur Dick Devine, interested only in the gold abundant on the planet, believe they must take Ransom (as ransom) with them to Malacandra.
Malacandra is a planet that is premodern, still in an “old stone age.” It is nonhierarchical, with no rulers or governmental structures, and it is cooperative rather than competitive, unafflicted by greed, war, or ambition. Ransom initially judges Malacandra by Earth’s standards and expectations, but he eventually concludes that Earth’s standards are deficient in comparison with Malacandra’s and that there is much his world could learn from theirs. Such social criticism is an important theme in the book.
Ransom eventually learns that Malacandra is an unfallen world filled with spiritual vitality. The planet is cathedral-like, with elongated vegetation and rock formations (resulting from the planet’s light gravitational pull) symbolically pointing heavenward. He learns that the God worshipped on the unfallen Malacandra is the same God he worships on Earth, and he also learns that each planet has a guardian angel (an Oyarsa) whose role is to protect and oversee it. Ransom meets the Oyarsa of Malacandra, from whom he learns about ancient interplanetary warfare similar to what the 17th-century English poet John Milton describes in his Paradise Lost: the Oyarsa of Thulcandra (Earth) rebelled against the “Old One” (God) and, after a fierce conflict, was conquered and thrown back to Thulcandra. It thereafter was isolated from the rest of the universe and referred to as the “silent planet.”
The Malacandrians know nothing about it except that the Old One did not abandon it but sent Maleldil (Christ) to rescue it. Lewis thus slipped the central elements of Christianity into the book, doing it so subtly that few early reviewers noticed. (He concluded, in a letter, that “any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.”)
Weston and Devine are compelled to return to Earth, and Ransom chooses to accompany them. His journey in Out of the Silent Planet, though it can serve as a stand-alone story, also equips him for the adventures he will experience in the second and third volumes of the trilogy: he has learned “Old Solar,” the language used throughout the universe except on the silent planet; he has accepted “otherness” by meeting and living with beings very different from his own species; and he has overcome his fear of death and learned to obey and put his trust in Maleldil. Each of these lessons serves as preparation for what lies ahead.
See also[]
| Title | Author | Release date | Signifigance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voyage | Stephen Baxter | 1996 | A novel about a human voyage to Mars |
| The Martian Chronicles | Ray Bradbury | 1950 | On a human voyage to Mars |
| The Martian | Andy Weir | 2011 | A novel about a human voyage to Mars |
| Red Mars | Kim Stanley Robinson | 1992 | A novel about a human voyage to Mars |
| Mars | Ben Bova | 1992 | A novel about a human voyage to Mars |
| Red Planet | Robert A. Heinlein | 1949 | A novel about life on Mars |
| GodEngine | Craig Hinton | 1996 | A novel about a human voyage to Mars |
| Imperial Moon | Christopher Bulis | 2000 | A novel about Victorian space travel |