Out of the Silent Planet

Imagine a smart teacher named Ransom who gets tricked by two mean men, Devine and Weston, and kidnapped in a super cool round spaceship to Mars, which the aliens call Malacandra. There, he meets friendly otter-people (hrossa), tall smart giants (sorn), and frog-artists (pfifltriggi) who live happily without fights because their planet boss, Oyarsa, keeps everything good and fair. Ransom learns Mars is perfect unlike broken Earth, stops the bad guys from hurting the aliens, and goes home a hero with big secrets about space and God.

In C.S. Lewis's 'Out of the Silent Planet,' Dr. Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist, is lured to a remote English house under false pretenses and abducted by his acquaintances, the ruthless entrepreneur Dick Devine and the fanatical physicist Professor Edward Weston. They force him aboard a revolutionary spherical spaceship bound for Mars, which they call Malacandra, intending to offer him as a human sacrifice to appease the planet's supposed savage inhabitants and secure gold deposits for their imperial ambitions. The novel critiques modern scientism and colonialism through the lens of these villains' utilitarian worldview, contrasting it with Ransom's growing moral intuition. Upon crash-landing on Malacandra, Ransom escapes into a breathtakingly beautiful world of towering mountains, endless canals, and three harmonious species of 'hnau': the poetic otter-like hrossa, the towering intellectual sorn, and the inventive pfifltriggi. Learning their language and culture, Ransom discovers a planet unfallen from sin, governed telepathically by the angelic Oyarsa, who reveals Earth's isolation as Thulcandra, the 'silent planet' due to its rebellion against the cosmic order. Ransom mediates between the humans and Oyarsa, exposing Weston's megalomaniacal plan to colonize and 'evolve' other worlds, ultimately returning transformed to Earth with a message of theological hope.