Given the author’s high purpose, it would have been easy for him not to have written a true work of science fiction at all, but instead to have only played with the genre, using its superficial form as a mere wedge by which to drive home “The Message”, particularly since that message includes a profound critique of the scientism so typical of the genre itself. True to the genre, Lewis devotes a significant percentage of the text to illustrating Malacandra’s strange flora, fauna, climate, topography, and, especially, its alien races. Science fiction’s particular strength lies in exploring the extreme possibilities of civilization, culture, and personhood. Whisked away though the Heavens, Ransom finds himself in Malacandra, a world whose extraordinary features shed light on our own. Though it’s immediately obvious that something is wrong, Ransom has “all the deep, irrational conviction of his age and class that such things could never cross the path of an ordinary person…and could least of all be associated with professors and old school-fellows.” Not long after this, Ransom is swept up in drama of cosmic proportions and eschatological implications. As chance would have it, the place is occupied by an old classmate, Devine, and his associate, a world-famous scientist named Weston.

Elwin Ransom, philologist and fellow of a Cambridge college, faces the prospect of being caught in the darkness of the English countryside without a place to sleep, fate and his own desire to help a frantic mother recover her intellectually disabled son bring him to the door of an ominous looking estate. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Episode 7, “The Backbone of Night” We make our world significant by the courage of our questions, and by the depth of our answers.” “Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet, of a humdrum star, lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. Oyarsa of Malacandra, Out of the Silent Planet Rather tell me what Maleldil has done in Thulcandra.” You do not understand, and it makes you do reverence to nothings and pass by what is really great. “My people have a law never to speak much of sizes or numbers to you others, not even to sorns.

Thulcandra cs lewis