Out of the Silent Planet (Space Tril­ogy, Book One) C. S. Lewis
Scrib­ner 2003World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

C.S. Lewis is prob­a­bly best known for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the other six books that com­prise The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia. But, about ten years before the tale of the Peven­sie children’s trip through a magic wardrobe, Lewis com­pleted a novel about an entirely dif­fer­ent sort of jour­ney. Out of the Silent Planet was the first vol­ume in what would become a tril­ogy about space travel.

The book cen­ters on Dr. Elwin Ran­som, a bril­liant philol­o­gist and Cam­bridge fel­low. While on a walk­ing tour of the Eng­lish coun­try­side, Ran­som hap­pens upon Devine, an old school­mate, and Weston, an accom­plished physi­cist. He dis­cov­ers the two doing some­thing rather sus­pi­cious, but they pla­cate Ran­som and offer him a room for the night. Unfor­tu­nately, his ini­tial impres­sions were spot-on, and he soon finds him­self drugged and sub­se­quently impris­oned on a space­ship by Weston and Devine. Although his cap­tors refuse to tell him every­thing, Ran­som learns through ques­tion­ing and eaves­drop­ping that they are en route to another planet within our solar sys­tem, that Weston and Devine have been there before, and that he is to be turned over to one of the species native to the planet.

After about a month of fly­ing through space, the trio’s craft lands. Weston and Devine soon try to hand Ran­som over to the inhab­i­tants, but the philol­o­gist man­ages to escape. Ran­som wan­ders the strange planet alone for a time, and even­tu­ally comes upon a mem­ber of a sec­ond sen­tient native species. Being a philol­o­gist, he imme­di­ately sets about learn­ing the creature’s lan­guage. The more flu­ent he becomes, the more he is able to learn about the planet and its inhab­i­tants, and the more he real­izes how poor a grasp his for­mer cap­tors have of those subjects.

Although Out of the Silent Planet con­cerns space travel, I’m not sure that it really fits into the cat­e­gory of sci­ence fic­tion. It con­tains almost no sci­ence or advanced tech­nol­ogy other than an early twentieth-century space­ship, of which the con­struc­tion and work­ings are never dis­cussed. The book focuses mainly on the rela­tion­ships between the three sen­tient species on the alien world, the rela­tion­ships between the var­i­ous plan­ets in our solar sys­tem, and the his­tory of the solar sys­tem itself. As in The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia, much of Lewis’s writ­ing here is Chris­t­ian alle­gory; there are char­ac­ters or classes of beings which rep­re­sent God, the Devil, angels, and demons.

Thee is much to enjoy in this book. Lewis, like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, enjoys invent­ing words and whole lan­guages, which I find fas­ci­nat­ing. Also inter­est­ing are the dynam­ics of three sen­tient species shar­ing a sin­gle world. Because none of them is clearly dom­i­nant, they all seem to have a more har­mo­nious rela­tion­ship with their planet that we humans do with earth.

I look for­ward to the next book in the series: Pere­landra.