Out of the Silent Planet (1) by C.S. Lewis
The extraordinary Dr. Ransom’s travels begin in Out of the Quiet Planet. This honourable man is grabbed by a megalomaniacal physicist and his sidekick and transported to the red planet Malacandra on a spaceship. Dr. Ransom would appear to be a suitable human sacrifice for the two men. Ransom manages to escape his captors once he is on the planet, endangering his life and his hopes of returning to Earth while becoming a stranger in a place that is both educational and enthralling in its resemblance to Earth. Out of the Quiet Planet, which was first published in 1943, continues to be a compelling work of mystery and intrigue.
Out of the Silent Planet (1) by C.S. Lewis
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The story opens with a professor of philology who is on vacation and using the time away from studying, instructing, and grading papers to take a “walking tour” of the English countryside. This character appears to have been modelled after Lewis’ close friend, The Lord of the Rings author, J. R. R. Tolkien, who was also a scholar of languages. Dr. Elwin Ransom, a professor, is looking for a place to stay for the night when he encounters a hysterical woman who is upset because her mentally challenged son didn’t arrive home from work, as usual, that day.
Ransom agrees to look for and find her boy, even though he actually simply wants to find a spot to stay the night as soon as possible. He finds the young man being beaten up by two other men while he is terrified out of his wits. After saving the boy, Ransom is shortly taken hostage by Professor Weston and Devine, the bad guys, who quickly drug him into unconsciousness.
When he wakes up, he is shocked to discover that he is travelling across space to a mysterious planet that his captors refer to as “Malacandra.” He quickly finds out that they want to offer him as a human sacrifice to the planet’s native “sorns.”
As soon as the ship touches down, Ransom uses a distraction to flee from his (now-former) captors. He discovers that things are not as they seem as he moves across the odd, new world’s environment. Even if his ultimate fate is not nearly as dire as Weston and Devine had anticipated, the information he learns about his own planet will forever alter him.
This piece of art is simply magnificent. Lewis used the science-fiction storytelling technique to express his opinions on the philosophical and moral disputes of his time. It may be argued that C. S. Lewis deserves more credit than Gene Roddenberry for ushering in a new era of storytelling by utilizing his Star Trek stories to remark on contemporary themes. Lewis was able to employ his customarily eloquent and funny prose to such a degree that his criticism had no bearing whatsoever on the story he was trying to tell. The “lessons” or “Aesops” in the majority of authors come across as abrupt, awkward, or heavy-handed. But not in this piece.
