The Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength

The Cosmic Trilogy relates the interplanetary travels of Ransom, C.S. Lewis’s ill-informed and terrified victim who leaves Earth much against his will and who, in the first book of the trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, published by the Bodley Head in 1938, encounters the imaginary and delightful world of Macalandra. In the second book, Perelandra (1943), Ransom is transported to a world of sweet smells and delicious tastes, a new Garden of Eden in which is enacted, with a difference, the story of Temptation. That Hideous Strength (1945) completes the trilogy and finds Dr Ransom returned from his travels in space and living in an English university town – where the Senior Common Room is given a mysterious depth, a more than earthly dimension which such things, in the author’s view, always have in life.

C.S. Lewis believed that popular science was the new mythology of his age, and in The Cosmic Trilogy he ransacks the uncharted territory of space and makes that mythology the medium of his spiritual imagination.