Out of The Silent Planet

Book review from The Movie Snob.

Out of The Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis. I've never read the world-famous Chronicles of Narnia, so maybe it's a little odd that I decided to pick up the first book in C.S. Lewis's space trilogy instead. The premise has long intrigued me. Suppose that on another planet there is a race of sentient alien beings that never experienced the Fall from the original state of grace and thus never got kicked out of their own Eden. What would they be like? And what would they make of human beings? That is the thought experiment that underlies Out of the Silent Planet, and, I assume, the other two books in the space trilogy. Professor Ransom is kidnapped by two other human beings, taken aboard a spaceship, and flown to the planet of Malacandra, where his captors intend to turn him over to the dominant local species. He escapes, and his adventures on Malacandra form the rest of this short (158 pages) novel. I thought it was very interesting, and I look forward to reading the other two books in the trilogy, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.