He also learns that each planet in the solar system has its own angelic ruler, and that Earth, or Thulcandra, has been cut off from the rest of the planets due to its ruler, well, turning against God and bending the entire human population towards evil. Fortunately Ransom’s kidnappers completely misread the Sorns intentions, and Ransom spends several weeks on the planet known by the inhabitants as Malcandra, living with the hrossa, meeting the eldil and the séroni (the Sorns, who never asked for a human sacrifice in the first place), and basically proving to be a much better ambassador to Malcandra than his two kidnappers had been. Ransom is kidnapped and taken to Mars as a sacrifice to an alien race, the Sorns.

Out of the Silent Planet sets the tone for the series and introduces Ransom, the main character. The whole trilogy is really more fantasy than science fiction, but I think it expresses the awe that people must have felt at the very idea of leaving the planet. A lot of the stories and movies from the 1930’s-1940’s come across as goofy, or just plain ignorant (take a look at any MST3K treatment of a black-and-white space travel movie, and you’ll see what I mean), but Lewis’s version of space travel is beautiful and amazing, even if scientifically it’s all wrong. Lewis referred to this genre as “Scientifiction”, and I’m still not sure how he managed to write so convincingly about space-travel when he (well, everybody, really) knew so little about space.

The results are strange, to say the least.Ĭ.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in a trilogy of stories linking space travel, alien minds, and a war within the solar system, to Lewis’s overarching view of a benevolent God. Humankind first ventured into space in 1961.

Sorns out of the silent planet