A good sci-fi story. Out of the Silent Planet is a fable of civilizational ethics, contrasting one civilization that expands (at the expense of others if necessary) versus another civilization that accepts its mortality, its cycle of birth and death, and thus would never sacrifice other worlds to survive.
Notable to find a few postmodern elements here in this book too. There's a breaking the fourth wall device late in the novel, and at the very end the story becomes self-referential: the main character writes to C.S. Lewis to complain about some of the choices Lewis made in telling the story. And then this character discusses certain parts of the story that simply couldn't be described in words. When an author writes a story, he has to pick and choose what to describe, what to leave out, how to frame and order the story, and so on. Here, the author talks about these choices right in front of the reader. It's quite a creative way to let the reader climb into the author's mind, and yet it's part of the story itself.
Notes:
* Dr. Elwin Ransom, walking the countryside and seeking a place for the night, wanders up to a household run by two men, Weston, a scientist, and Devine, a businessman. They offer him whiskey, but when they discover that he's walking alone and incommunicado on an extended walking vacation (English dudes used to do this kind of thing back then) they drug his whiskey. Ransom wakes up in some sort of airship, which turns out to be a spaceship, en route to the planet Malacandra.* "Why has no one heard of it? Why has it not been in all the papers?" Ransom can't believe what he's told about the planet Malacandra, the fact that it has inhabitants, etc. [This is a wonderful, all-too-typical example of the modern media consumer who assumes if he hasn't read about or heard about something it can't possibly exist. Walter Lippman and his disciples will have their way with you if you navigate the media this way!]
* Interesting and quite modern-sounding details on the spaceship: a sphere where "down" is towards the center; on the punishing light of the Sun from space, etc. Ransom experiences a type of euphoria while traveling in space, he's not fearful at all.
* Ransom overhears Devine and Weston talking about how he is to be sacrificed to the "sorns" and he imagines what the sorns would be like, knowing for sure that anything he read in H.G. Wells would be completely different from reality.
* They land on Malacandra, exit the spaceship, and begin moving their stores and supplies into huts the two men had built on prior visits to the planet. Ransom takes in the landscape, which is unimaginably weird, with a water like substance with weird shapes coming out of it, and wildly different vegetation. Something rushes at them from the water, Weston fires at it with his pistol, and in the chaos Ransom escapes.
* Ransom rushes out into the "woods" a forest of incredibly tall low-gravity, spongy trees; eventually he becomes tired and thirsty and sits down to rest near a stream of hot and apparently undrinkable water; he begins talking to himself, sleeps, later wakes up with a weird sense of himself as someone else. He drinks a large amount of water which tastes delicious, and then cuts some material out of one of the "trees" but it's spongy and chewy like chewing gum, he can't eat it or swallow it.
* Ransom comes into contact with some other beings, giraffe-like animals that are incredibly tall, he still has a great fear of these "sorns" but then comes into contact with a very tall seal-like creature, a "hross," six or seven feet tall. He realizes it has language, and because Ransom is a philologist he begins to communicate. The hross takes him on a boat and provides him food.
* Ransom learns about the seroni (plural for sorn), then visits the hrossa (plural for hross) village, gets to know their culture, their children, and as he gradually learns more and more of their language and culture, he corrects his earlier impressions. They have a relatively sophisticated agriculture with irrigation, they know astronomy, etc. Ransom learns much more about the seroni and also learns about yet another life form, the pfifltriggi, a sort of frog-like people who mine and smelt gold. "On Malacandra, apparently, three distinct species had reached rationality, and none of them had yet exterminated the other two."
* The seroni are a sort of the planet's intelligentsia, but they have no skill in domains like fishing, sailing, manufacturing, etc.
* The eldila, a sort of sprite or faerie species: a young female spoke to something and Ransom asked her who she was speaking to, and she realizes "the hmān [human] cannot see the eldil."
* The hross Hyoi discusses memory and experience with Ransom in an intriguing exchange:
"This love, you say, comes only once while the hross lives?""But it takes his whole life. When he is young he has to look for his mate; and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom.""But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?""That is like saying 'My food I must be content to eat.'""I do not understand.""A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmān, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The seroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then--that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?"
* The hrossa strike the reader as a type of bicameral man, an idealized human without all of humanity's base instincts, naturally peaceful, naturally cooperative, naturally monogamous, not greedy for experiences or possessions, they live happily in the present moment, etc.
* The hrossa go on a hunt for the shark-like creature that Weston and Devine saw on their arrival. Ransom, Hyoi and Whin encounter it and kill it. Then a rifle shot rings out, killing Hyoi.
* Ransom then goes to see Oyarsa, the sort of deity-like figure on this planet. He follows the instructions of an eldil to get there (this time, he was able to hear it). He barely completes the journey: it's at altitude, involves lots of climbing and very little atmosphere; he finally reaches the mouth of a cave and inside meets a sorn, Augray, who explains more about Malacandra and its inhabitants. "...the creature he had been avoiding ever since he landed had turned out to be as amicable as the hrossa." Ransom and Augray journey together to see Oyarsa, Ransom riding on the Augray's shoulders. He arrives to the land of Oyarsa, is taken across to an island on a boat by a hross, then studies some of the stone artwork and realizes that Malacandra is Mars. He meets a pfiffltrig and learns more about this species as well.
* The next morning he is roused by the voice of an eldil and instructed to go to Oyarsa, a sort ethereal being. Oyarsa asks Ransom what he is so afraid of. Oyarsa tells a creation myth story about the Oyarsa of Earth, who became "bent" (read: evil, unbalanced) and sought "to spoil other worlds besides his own" which led to a great war between this Oyarsa and the bent one. Ransom says: "After the story, Oyarsa, I may tell you that our world is very bent."
* The Oyarsa of Earth is sort of a Miltonesque Satan-type figure who "sank out of heaven."
* Their conversation is interrupted by a procession of hrossa carrying Weston and Devine. "Weston was following the most orthodox rules for frightening and then conciliating primitive races... 'I'm inclined to think they have even less intelligence than we supposed.'" [Weston comports himself like an early 20th century British anthropologist, or worse, like an American tourist.]
* Chapter 20 contains an interesting ethical and metaphysical debate about a civilization's right to continue. Weston's character is taking the position basically that "I support the human race to the extent that I would go to other worlds and even harm other sentient species in order to take over their worlds; I would even killing some of his own species, and even give up my own life in order to help the human race survive." Oyarsa gives the contra-argument here, which basically requires an acceptance of death, both on an individual and on a species level. This conversation is further complicated, interestingly, because Weston and Oyarsa don't speak the same language: they are using Ransom as a translator, but his language skills are not advanced enough to fully discuss these topics! It's a very well done chapter and quite thought-provoking.
* The humans are sent home, at great risk because now Mars and the Earth are in opposition (and thus the distance is so great that they are likely to run out of air on the way), but they are forced to leave, and they actually do make it back to Earth alive.
* Another interesting chapter here where the author/narrator breaks the fourth wall, explaining that by a mere chance he had a correspondence with the character named Ransom, and the two of them spent a full weekend discussing his experiences on the planet. They then decided together to write a fictionalized story to get the truth out about this great battle between good and evil; about the human race's expansionist/survivalist instinct to expand by crowding out--even exterminating--other species and civilizations, versus the Malacandra civilization's more Zen/Buddhist philosophy, where they would never impose on another civilization to further the survival of their own.
* The postscript is another fascinating and "meta" part of the book, where Ransom writes to C.S. Lewis about the things Lewis left out, about his disagreements with some of the choices Lewis made in fashioning the story, and then finally about certain things that couldn't really be described in words. This was fun to read, since the author is really talking here about the specific choices has has to make when writing a novel, but yet he's talking about them right in front of the reader as the reader finishes the book.
Vocab:
Faute de mieux: for lack of something better
Alb: a friendly spirit, ghostly being, genius, or fairy.
Deva: sometimes used to refer to any being that is thought to be made of etheric matter, including nature spirits like fairies and ondines
Consistory: (Roman Catholic Church) the council of cardinals, with or without the Pope. (Church of England) a court presided over by a bishop, for the administration of ecclesiastical law in a diocese.
Oviparous: (of a bird, etc.) producing young by means of eggs that are hatched after they have been laid by the parent.