Out of The Silent Planet - Major Themes

Major Themes

The eldila, who work for Oyarsa as messengers and maintainers of the planet, are meant to supply the role of angels. Oyarsa is a more powerful eldil, akin to an archangel or patron deity. In this way, Oyarsa have some traits of the Ainur of the legendarium of J. R. R. Tolkien, who was a friend of Lewis. Oyarsa's superior, Maleldil the Young, represents Jesus. The 'Old one', the creator of Mars, is God the Father. Part of the background in Out of the Silent Planet is that Earth's Oyarsa (who is obviously Lucifer) became "bent" (corrupt), destroyed most of the life on Mars, and was forcibly imprisoned inside the Moon's orbit leaving him to rule the inhabitants of the Moon and the (subsequently created) humans of Earth. His attempts to convince the inhabitants of Mars to flee the devastated planet to other worlds were stopped by the Oyarsa who killed the rebels and subsequently reshaped some parts of the planet's surface to continue to support life. This was, however, in the distant past, many generations ago.

Mars' Oyarsa also asks Weston, "What do you do when a planet is dead? ... Then what when all are dead?" To Weston, such a "defeatist" attitude is intolerable, although had the Martians settled Earth, nascent mankind would have obviously received short shrift. On hearing it he declares himself on the side of the Bent One and his defiant attitude ("He fights, jumps, lives, not like Maleldil who lets everybody die").

The concepts of space and other planets in this novel are largely taken from medieval cosmology. For more information on it, see C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image, a series of lectures on this cosmology that were published after his death.

Lewis depicts Mars based partly on what was known of it at the time and partly on legend. For example, Mars' atmosphere was known to be thin and unbreathable, but he decided to treat the canals of Mars as real though he was already aware that they probably did not exist. Lewis reconciles this by having Mars' breathable atmosphere concentrated in the canals, or handramits, and some blotchy lowland areas where the pfifltriggi live, while the bare surface of Mars, or harandra, is cold and lifeless. While journeying through a trench in the harandra with Augray the sorn, he had to breathe out of an oxygen bottle, and the sky was pitch black, except when a dust storm colored the sky ochre (of course, this ochre colour is permanent in the real Mars' sky). He also depicts things on Mars as having vertical exaggeration relative to their closest Earth counterparts, which he felt to be appropriate for Mars' lower gravity.