His roseate cliffs and purple forests offer the reader a much more romanticized rendition of the Red Planet. There are woods, fields, lakes, mountains, and plateaus: a much brighter picture than the factual Mars. In this Lewisian fantasy, Malacandra’s geographical realms vary almost as greatly as those on Earth. This is Malacandra-the term used by its natives in identifying their world. Lewis does not deny such locales throughout the Martian landscape, but also throws in splashes of color-oases of abundant life-and a variety of life. Mars, as modern man’s continual probing advocates, was seen as a sandy, desolate world. One way in which he achieves this is by providing imagery of the Martian habitats that form a contrast with a good deal of the literature up to this point. In this first installment of his sci-fi trilogy, however, Lewis does strive for a fresh take on the theme. Ransom (the protagonist) himself, toy with the idea of the unknown life-forms on this alien earth and reference the Wellsian notion of creatures dark, loathsome, and utterly un-humanoid. Spattered throughout the text of Out of the Silent Planet, the narrator, as well as Mr. Wells, whose War of the Worlds was published in full in 1898. The responsibility for this falls primarily on the shoulders of H. G. It was called Out of the Silent Planet, and the alien world on which the protagonist finds himself is, in fact, Mars.Įven Lewis cannot remove himself entirely from the preconceptions that culture had of the Red Planet.

Lewis had his first science fiction novel published that year. A sizeable portion of its American audience mistook the news-like broadcast to be a literal invasion of some kind. For one, it was that year that Orson Welles delivered his radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds by H. G. So it happened that 1938 witnessed a bit of a boom in the sensationalization of Martian fiction. Around this time, other historic literary figures took up an interest in the Red Planet and set fictional plots in revolution around this alien world. Throughout the thirties, there were several installments of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s book series John Carter of Mars. The 1930s was a decade sprinkled with literature of all sorts that related fantastic tales concerning the goings-on of Mars and its inhabitants.

Ransom out of the silent planet