Out of the Silent Planet

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Out of the Silent Planet
First edition cover
Author	C. S. Lewis
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	Space Trilogy
Genre(s)	Science fiction novel
Publisher	The Bodley Head
Publication date	1938
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	264 pp (first edition, hardback)
ISBN	N/A
Followed by	Perelandra

Out of the Silent Planet is the first novel of a science fiction trilogy written by C. S. Lewis, sometimes referred to as the Space Trilogy, Ransom Trilogy or Cosmic Trilogy. The other volumes are Perelandra (also published as Voyage to Venus) and That Hideous Strength, and a fragment of a sequel was published posthumously as The Dark Tower. The trilogy was inspired and influenced by David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).[1]

According to his biographer A. N. Wilson, Lewis wrote the novel after a conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien in which both men lamented the state of contemporary fiction. They agreed that Lewis would write a space-travel story, and Tolkien would write a time-travel one. Tolkien's story only exists as a fragment, published in The Lost Road and other writings (1987) edited by his son Christopher.

Plot summary

The story begins with Dr. Elwin Ransom, a professor of philology at a college of the University of Cambridge, on a hiking trip in the English Midlands. Being refused lodging in the village of Nadderby he must travel into the night the six miles to Sterk. He comes to a small, isolated cottage, the home of a woman and her mentally subnormal son, Harry. The anxious woman thinks Ransom is Harry and runs into him as he comes toward the cottage. She implicitly declines to accommodate Ransom, but tells him about where Harry works, the Rise, the small estate of Professor Weston. She also speaks of a gentleman from London staying there, Mr. Devine, whom Ransom discovers to be his former schoolfellow, a person whom he "cordially disliked." Despite the woman's doubt that Ransom would find lodging, he decides to go there anyway, assuring the woman that he will see to it that Harry is sent home.

When he gets to the front door of the Rise, Ransom hears shouting and struggling inside. When he goes around back, he sees Weston and Devine trying to force Harry to go with them on an interplanetary spaceflight to Malacandra (Mars). Ransom intervenes in the struggle, and Devine sees him as a better prospect than Harry for what he and Weston have in mind. With Weston's grudging consent Devine offers Ransom a drink and accommodations.

After enjoying what he thinks is his nightcap, Ransom loses consciousness. When he awakens shortly thereafter he realizes that he has been drugged. He tries to escape but is subdued by Weston and Devine. When he again regains consciousness he finds himself in a metallic spherical spacecraft en route to Malacandra. The wonder and excitement of such a prospect relieves his anguish at being kidnapped, but Ransom is put on his guard when he overhears Weston and Devine deliberating whether they will again drug him or keep him conscious when they turn him over to the inhabitants of Malacandra, the "sorns", as a sacrifice. Ransom, who has been put to work as cook and scullion, secrets a knife and plans to escape when he gets the chance.

Soon after the three land on the strange planet, Ransom gets his chance to run off into the unknown landscape. He wanders around, finding many differences between Earth and Malacandra, in that all the lakes, streams, and rivers are warm; the gravity is significantly less; and the plants and mountains are strangely tall and thin.

Ransom later meets a civilized native of Malacandra, a hross named Hyoi. He becomes a guest for several months at Hyoi's village, where he uses his philological skills to learn the language of the hrossa and learns their culture. In the process he discovers that gold, known to the hrossa as "sun's blood", is plentiful on Malacandra, and thus is able to discern Devine's motivation for making the voyage thither. Weston's motives are shown to be more complex; he is bent on expanding humanity through the universe, abandoning each planet and star system as it becomes uninhabitable.

The hrossa honor Ransom greatly by asking him to join them in a hunt for a hnakra (plural hnéraki), a fierce water-creature which seems to be the only dangerous predator on the planet, resembling both a shark and a crocodile. While hunting, Ransom is told by an eldil, an almost invisible creature reminiscent of a spirit or ghost, that he must meet Oyarsa, the eldil who is ruler of the planet. He refuses the summons, as he wishes to proceed with the hunt. Hyoi, after killing the hnakra with Ransom's help, is shot dead by Devine and Weston, who are trying to find Ransom. Ransom is told by Hyoi's friend (another hross named Whin) that this is the consequence of disobeying Oyarsa, and that Ransom must now cross the mountains to escape Weston and Devine and fulfil his orders. On his journey, Ransom finally meets a sorn, as he long feared he might. He finds, however, that the séroni are peaceful and kind. Augray (the sorn) explains to him the nature of Oyarsa's body, and that of all eldils. The next day, carrying the human on his back, Augray takes Ransom to Oyarsa.

After a stop at the dwelling place of an esteemed sorn scientist, wherein Ransom is questioned thoroughly about all manner of facts about Earth, Ransom finally makes it to Meldilorn, the home of Oyarsa. In Meldilorn, Ransom meets a pfifltrigg who tells Ransom of the beautiful houses and artwork his race make in their native forests. Ransom then is led to Oyarsa and long awaited conversation begins. Through the conversation Ransom finds out that there are Oyéresu (the plural) for each of the planets in our solar system; in the four inner planets, which have organic life (intelligent and non-intelligent), the local Oyarsa is responsible for that life. The Oyarsa of Earth, called Thulcandra ("the silent planet") by the Malacandrans, has turned evil and has been restricted to Thulcandra by Maleldil, the ruler of the universe. Ransom is ashamed at how little he can tell Oyarsa about Earth and how foolish he and other humans seem to Oyarsa. While the two are talking, Devine and Weston are brought in guarded by hrossa, because they have killed three of that race. Oyarsa then dissects their characters and beliefs.

Oyarsa tells Weston and Devine that he would not tolerate the presence of such creatures, but lets them leave the planet immediately, albeit under very unfavourable orbital conditions. To Ransom, Oyarsa offers him the option of staying on Malacandra. He decides he does not belong there, perhaps because he feels himself unworthy and perhaps because he yearns to be back among the human beings of earth. After a difficult return journey, the space-ship makes it back to Earth. Weston and Devine do not further molest Ransom, perhaps realizing that if Ransom were to try to expose their villainies, no-one would believe him, since there is no corroboration for the story. To prevent further intrusions in Malacandra, Oyarsa has caused the ship to disintegrate shortly after landing.

Ransom himself half-doubts whether all that happened was true, and he realizes that others will be even less inclined to believe it if he should speak of it. However, when the author (Lewis) writes him asking whether he has heard of the medieval Latin word "Oyarses" and knows what it meant, he lets him in on the secret. Ransom then dedicates himself to the mission that Oyarsa gave him before he left Malacandra of stopping Weston from further evil.

The storyline may have been influenced by H. G. Wells's First Men in the Moon which Lewis described as "The best of the sort Science Fiction I have read...." in a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green. Wells's book, like Lewis's, reaches its climax with a meeting between an Earthman and the wise ruler of an alien world, during which the Earthman makes very ill-considered boasts of his species' military prowess. The characters of Weston and Devine might be, in general, dark versions of Wells's Cavor and Bradford. In both books, a scientist with a wide-ranging mind forms a partnership with an eminently practical man who has a special attraction to extraterrestrial bars of gold, and they quietly build themselves a spaceship in the English countryside. In both stories, the interplanetary craft are spherical, though only Lewis' is called a "space-ship". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, J. J. Astor in his A Journey in Other Worlds first used the term "space-ship" in 1894, but Lewis was the fourth person to use the term in published material. Perhaps his creation of new worlds, like H.G. Wells, is particularly interesting knowing that it was only in 1923 that Edwin Hubble discovered "other" galaxies outside of our planetary system.

Major themes

The eldila, who work for Oyarsa as messengers and maintianers of the planet, evidently are meant to supply the role of angels. Oyarsa is a more powerful angel, perhaps an archangel, and Oyarsa's superior, Maleldil the Young, represents Jesus. The 'Old one', the creator of Mars, is God the Father. Part of the background in Out of the Silent Planet is that Earth's Oyarsa (who is obviously Lucifer) became "bent" (corrupt), destroyed most of the life on Mars, and was forcibly imprisoned inside the Moon's orbit, having induced (as comes up later in the series) the creatures living under the Lunar surface to adopt evil ways and deliberately destroy all the life which once existed on their surface. Because the eldila, who fill space (or "the heavens," which are depicted as warm and bright under the influence of the Sun) know nothing about what goes on inside those boundaries, Earth is called Thulcandra, "the silent planet". While Earth has fallen into evil, Mars has not. This represented one of Lewis's concerns about space travel: that fallen humanity would have nothing to offer other life in space other than depravity.

As in in many other science fiction works of his time and earlier, Mars in this book is conceived of as a dying world; the enormous canals believed at the time to be a major feature of its surface (until space probes proved them to be either nonexistent or a misinterpretation of natural river canyons) were conceived as a major engineering project undertaken by the Martians in their effort to survive. The logical conclusion, first made by H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds and repeated by various others, was to assume that the Martians would eventually try to escape their dying world and settle on the younger and more vigorous Earth.

Olaf Stapledon, in Last and First Men—a monumental future history stretching over millions perhaps even billions of years, which was published shortly before Lewis' book—made a further extrapolation: humans in the far-off future escaping the dying Earth and settling on Venus, in the process totally exterminating its native inhabitants - an intelligent marine species. Stapeldon's book can be seen as condoning such interplanetary genocide as a justified act if necessary for racial survival, though some of Stapeldon's partisans denied that such was his intention.

Lewis very strongly objected to the idea, and his book can be seen as partially a rebuttal of it. Prof. Weston's arguments in his confrontation with Oyarsa, where he outrightly defends the "right" of "culturally superior" humans to displace and exterminate the Martians are clearly intended to represent what Lewis conceived as Stapledon's arguments. Counterposed by Lewis is the vision of the three virtuous Martian species, aware that their planet is dying, stoically accepting their fate and living a harmonious life under the wise guidance of Oyarsa. Members of the three species are also aware of the appointed day of their own individual deaths and accept it.

Though their ancestors possessed the technology to build spaceships and go to other planets, and though Earth's "Bent Oyarsa" (Satan) tried to put that thought into their minds, the Malacandrans have foregone this temptation. Malacandra's Oyarsa does mention that taking this momentous decision was not quite smooth, and that some rebels whom the Bent Oyarsa had made "wise enough to see the death of their kind approaching, but not wise enough to endure it" and who could not be healed had to be "unbodied" (by Oyarsa himself as Maleldil's agent). This was, however, in the distant past, many generations ago.

To Prof. Weston, such a "defeatist" attitude is intolerable, although had the Martians settled Earth, nascent mankind would have obviously received short shrift. On hearing it he declares himself on the side of the Bent One and his defiant attitude ("He fights, jumps, lives, not like Maleldil who lets everybody die"). In Perelandra, this leads Weston to falling under demonic possession and eventually dying a most gruesome death.

The concepts of space and other planets in this novel are largely taken from medieval cosmology. For more information on it, see C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image, a series of lectures on this cosmology that were published after his death.

Hrossa, Séroni, Pfifltriggi

The hrossa (singular hross) resemble bipedal otters or seals, and are somewhat taller and thinner than humans. They live in the low river valleys (handramit in the speech of the eldila) and specialize in farming, fishing, and performing arts such as dancing and poetry. They are especially gifted in making poetry; yet they refuse to write it down as they believe that books ruin words and poems. Their technical level is low, and they wear only pocketed loincloths. The boats that they build are similar to our canoes. They add an initial /h/ sound to their words.

The séroni (singular sorn; the plural is sometimes given as sorns) are thin, fifteen-foot-high humanoids having coats of pale feathers and seven-fingered hands.^[1] They live in mountain caves of the high country (harandra in the speech of the eldila), though they often descend into the handramit where they raise giraffe-like livestock. They are the scholars and thinkers of Malacandra, specializing in science and abstract learning. Their technical level is high, and they design machinery, which is built by the pfifltriggi. Although they can write they do not compose written works of history or fiction as they feel the hrossa are superior at it.

The pfifltriggi (singular pfifltrigg) have tapir-like heads (with a bulge at the back containing the brain) and frog-like bodies; they lean their elbows on the ground when at rest, and sometimes when working with their hands. Their movements are quick and insectlike. They are the builders and technicians of Malacandra. They build houses and gadgets thought up by the séroni. They are miners who especially like to dig up "sun's blood" (gold) and other useful and beautiful minerals. They are the only species said to wear a form of clothes, other than the hrossa, and even wear goggles to protect their eyes.

All three of these races are "hnau" (a word referring to sentient or reasoning beings, in which humans are included) and "unfallen": free of the tendency to evil and sin that plagues humans. Ransom describes the emotional connection between the races as a cross between that of equals and that of person to an animal, mirrored in the way that humans tend to anthropomorphize pets. Members of the three races do not believe any one of the races to be superior to the others; they acknowledge, rather, that no single race can do everything.

In the sequels it is made clear that the language of the hrossa is the primary Old Solar language, and that the languages of the other two species are late derivatives of it. This represents Lewis' view that the symbolic and mythopoeic imagination is the primary language of the human mind and that scientific and technological analysis is a later development. In the essay Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare^[2] he argues that, though reason is the organ of truth, imagination is the organ of meaning.

Other appearances

The hrossa, séroni, and pfifltriggi are several of the races living on Mars in Larry Niven's 1999 novel Rainbow Mars; they are referred to as the "Pious Ones" by the Barsoomian races. The hrossa are called the "Fishers", the pfifltriggi the "Smiths", and the séroni the "High Folk". The pfifltriggi are one of the races who chose to ride to Earth on Yggdrasil.

The séroni appear at the beginning of the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as one of the Martian races allied against the "mollusc invaders" (the Martians from The War of the Worlds).

In Scarlet Traces: The Great Game, a hieroglyphics-filled chamber seems to show the hrossa, séroni, and pfifltriggi as the original races of Mars, that were wiped out by the arrival of the War of the Worlds Martians.

Weston's speech and its translation

The speech which Weston delivers at the book's climax, and Ransom's effort to render it into the Old Solar spoken by the Malacandrians, demonstrate the enormous gulf in cultural and moral perceptions, which renders Weston's value judgements utterly untranslatable and may be said to make them absurd; thus creating a sort of social criticism. The “translation” that we read is to be understood as a back-translation into English of what Ransom said in Old Solar.

Glossary

• Arbol — the Sun (Field of Arbol - Solar System)
• crah — final section of a poem
• eldil — spirit, angel
• Glundandra — Jupiter
• handra — earth, land, planet
• harandra — high earth, plateau
• handramit — low earth, valley
• hlab — language
• hluntheline — long for, yearn for, desire (for the future)
• hnakra, pl. hnéraki — a vicious aquatic beast hunted by the hrossa. Its qualities could be those of a shark and a crocodile. Lewis may have borrowed the word from Germanic nicor, Old English niker(en), meaning "sea monster".^{[citation needed]}
• hnakrapunt, pl. hnakrapunti — hnakra-slayer
• hnau — rational creature
• honodraskrud — ground-weed
• hressni — female hrossa
• hru — blood (hence arbol hru, gold)
• Malacandra — a compound noun, formed with the prefix Malac and the noun handra, which latter means earth, land, or planet, and referring to the fourth planet from the sun; in English: Mars
• Maleldil — Jesus, the second person of God with "the Old One" and "the Third One."
• Oyarsa, pl. Oyéresu — (Title) Ruler of a planet, a higher-order angel, perhaps an arch-angel.
• Perelandra — a compound noun, formed with the prefix Perel and the noun handra, which means earth, land, or planet, and referring to the second planet from the sun; in English: Venus
• Thulcandra — a compound noun, formed with the prefix Thulc, meaning "silent", and handra, meaning earth, land, or planet, referring to the third planet from the sun in English: "Silent Planet" or Earth
• wondelone — long for, yearn for, miss (from the past).

The hrossa's word for "to eat" contains consonants unreproducible by the human mouth. It is not clear how that word would be pronounced on Venus, where Ransom, in the sequel, finds humans speaking the same language spoken by the hrossa.

Publication history

• 1938, UK, The Bodley Head, N/A, Pub date 1 April 1938, hardback (first edition)
• 1996, ?, MacMillan Publishing Company, ISBN 0020868804, Pub date ? June 1996, paperback
• 2003, USA, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-7432-3490-1, Pub date 17 March 2003, paperback

Endnotes

1. ^ There is an interesting parallel with Dale Russell's speculation that a likely candidate for the evolution of intelligent life would have been a theropod dinosaur such as Troodon. Some theropods are believed to have been feathered.
2. ^ Selected Literary Essays: Cambridge 1969, p. 251.

Further reading

• Downing, David C, Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy. University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. ISBN 0-87023-997-X

External links

• A review by Tal Cohen
• Review at Starlight Fading
• Quotations and Allusions in Out of the Silent Planet
• Out of the Silent Planet publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database