The premise, if anyone should be ignorant of it, is that Ransom, an English academic, is kidnapped and taken via makeshift spacecraft by two mad companions to Mars - which, as we soon learn, is called Malacandra by all rational creatures save ourselves. Out of the Silent Planet will remind Wellsians of The Time Machine and especially The First Men in the Moon on account of its speculations about other rational species and varieties of social organization conjoined to a marked lack of interest in the niceties of rocketry and thermodynamics. Lewis wears his debt to the science fiction of H.G. So I thought that I would give the series - the entire series - another try, and I have finally made good on that decision. When I mentioned this to a friend a few years ago I was told (to vary the metaphor) that I had left the wedding just as the best wine was being served. On my first attempt on Lewis’ Space Trilogy, over twenty years ago, I mostly disliked it - disliked it enough, at least, that I abandoned (space)ship after the second volume.
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