Name: Out of the Silent Planet
ISBN: 9780606012140

Out of the Silent Planet

The first book in Lewis's Space Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet tells the story of Dr. Elwin Ransom, a philologist who likes to explore the English countryside on foot. Seeking out a place to stay the night, he ends up at the estate of a colleague who is away in London. However, the house is not empty. Ransom stumbles upon the plot of a megalomaniacal scientist and his collaborator, who just happens to be an old schoolmate of Ransom's. Drugged, kidnapped, and wisked away in the scientists rocket to the planet Malacandra where he is to serve as a human sacrifice, Dr. Ransom escapes into the strange Malacandran wilderness pursued by his kidnappers and abandoning his hopes of returning to Earth. Ransom discovers that the inhabitants of Malacandra are not what his kidnappers believed them to be. In his adventures in the often strangely beautiful, sometimes dangerous, and sometimes surprisingly familiar Malacandra and its inhabitants, Ransom uncovers information about the larger universe and Earth's place that suggest he has as much to discover about his home planet as he does about the alien Malacandra.

What Hacker News says

graemepSep 2025

Which CS Lewis fiction have you read? Till We Have Faces is the best IMO and few people seem to read it. I also like Out of The Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength, although not the middle book of that trilogy, Perelandra. The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce are pretty good too.

I am not sure Tolkien's books are accurately described as children's books. The Hobbit perhaps, but not the Lord of The Rings IMO.

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sethc2Jul 2021

I love the space trilogy. Out of the silent planet helped me think of what the “heavens” are. I’d definitely recommend them, though I love thinking of t he symbolic nature of things.

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ThorentisDec 2019

I used to think of space as big and empty - and indeed, this map invokes that feeling a little. But since reading "Out of the Silent Planet" I have come to see it a different way.

He had read of 'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now-now that the very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean all the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he now saw that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes-and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name.

> Out of the Silence Planet (C.S. Lewis)

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rwnspaceNov 2017

Out of the Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis. Wonderfully written, though not as completely fleshed-out as a modern sci-fi reader may be used to. Still stands on its own two feet, worth a try. My first sci-fi.

The Golden Bough, Frazer. Sublime, frustrating and intriguing. Changes your dreams, whether you immediately realise it or not.

How Things Work: The Universal Encyclopedia of Machines. My grandfather gave me this when I was 8, I still regularly leaf through the tea-coloured pages and detailed black-and-red drawings two decades later. It's a charming book, the kind of thing we have websites for nowadays.

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fennecfoxenJun 2016

Fun article! Interesting titles.

Of the post-Radium-Age list, I'd like to point out C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength for special attention, just because everyone and their dog has some experience with Narnia and usually has some preconceptions of what Lewis is all about based on those -- but this story is likely to defy those expectations. If you'd like to turn your one-dimensional stereotype of the man into something more nuanced, this book is the ticket. Also, a good portion of it (indeed, the central plot-bearing part) is of Extremely High Quality (as endorsed by George Orwell... albeit with certain qualifications for the rest of the book). This portion reads sort of like a spiritual prequel to 1984 (a work that would come 4 years later). It's also surprising to many people to find Lewis writing, even incidentally, about eroticism, and that's quite besides the chain-smoking butch-lesbian chief-of-police (rumored to be a sort of character Lewis slightly fancied, if I recall correctly).

Third in a trilogy of space stories (which few are aware Lewis wrote) this novel just barely predates nuclear weapons - so Space is still a positive thing instead of being a place of vacuum and death filled with the missiles of global thermonuclear annihilation. Also, if you've heard about how fascinated the author was with Relativity and time moving at different speeds in different places (e.g. in Narnia) you may have wondered why Lewis never did a time travel novel. Turns out, he started one, and its rough draft eventually turned into this. My advice: read the short and sweet Out of the Silent Planet first for context, skip Perelandra (dangerously overdosed with overt Christian allegory), and then try this thing.

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kejDec 2014

> I would suggest reading Perelandra

People should read Out of the Silent Planet first, and then Perelandra. The third book in the series is also good, but goes in a different direction and doesn't really touch on the relationship between the Christian God and extraterrestrial life.

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