Life on the Silent Planet: Essays on Christian Living from C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy

FORTHCOMING TITLE, ETA JANUARY 2025

Years before he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis published another fantastical fiction series: the Ransom Trilogy. Yet these three novels – Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength – have never enjoyed the same widespread popularity as Narnia or any of Lewis’s apologetical works, whether in mainstream culture or among Christians.

However, as the twenty-first century unfolds, readers are rediscovering the Ransom Trilogy as a vital and prophetic work for our cultural moment. Life on the Silent Planet is a groundreaking collection of essays, bringing together an accomplished group of scholars and writers to discover and apply the insights of these novels to Christian living, particularly focussing on the unique vices and challenges of modernity. Fraught topics such as gender, contraception, bureaucracy, and transhumanism, often overlooked or shied away from in contemporary Christian teaching, were diagnosed and anticipated by Lewis with startling clarity in the 1930s and 40s. This volume seeks to bring these insights, woven into the rich imaginative world of the Ransom Trilogy, to bear upon the realities of the Christian life, enabling Christians to think deeply, live faithfully, and tune themselves again to the music of what Lewis called “the Great Dance” of creation.

340 pages.

View excerpt here.

“With the passing of the years Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy proves itself to be more profound and prescient than even his most devoted readers had guessed. Perhaps, in time, it will be prized even more than the Chronicles of Narnia, or his apologetics. This is a marvelous collection of essays on the trilogy, several of them written by friends. I’ll return to this book many times in the coming years. Read it and you will too.”

– C.R. WILEY, Author of In the House of Tom Bombadil and The Household and the War for the Cosmos 

Rhys Laverty

A Note on the Text

OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET