The distinguished author of The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters has written a new novel in the vein of its predecessor, Out of the Silent Planet. The hero of that earlier work is now transported to a world of sweet smells and delicious tastes, where beasts are friendly and naked beauty is unashamed; a new Garden of Eden, wherein is enacted, but with a difference, the story of the Temptation.

Those who like 'books about other planets' will never need encouragement to read a new one. Those who do not are invited to read—and then to ask themselves whether the theme here presented could have been embodied in any other way.

Mr. Lewis is convinced that 'popular science' is the actual mythology of our age, and he has endeavoured to make that mythology the medium of spiritual imagination. His aim is partly to exorcise the evil and ugly fantasies which such material is already attracting to itself; but much more to find on his own account that 'unimaginable lodge for solitary thinking' which Homer found in the Mediterranean, the medieval romancer in Babylon, and Samuel Butler in Australia, but for which we ourselves must now ransack space. Those readers who journeyed with Ransom in Malacandra will revel in this second voyage through the unknown, and in the strangeness both of beauty and horror which awaits the voyager. And, warns the author, let those who feel inclined to label these strange travels 'escapism' weigh well the differences—and they are of considerable practical importance—between Wishful Thinking and Thoughtful Wishing.

From the dust jacket

Written during the dark hours immediately before and during the Second World War, C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, of which Perelandra is the second volume, stands alongside such works as Albert Camus's The Plague and George Orwell's 1984 as a timely parable that has become timeless, beloved by succeeding generations as much for the sheer wonder of its storytelling as for the significance of the moral concerns.

For the trilogy's central figure, C. S. Lewis created perhaps the most memorable character of his career, the brilliant, clear-eyed, and fiercely brave philologist Dr. Elwin Ransom. Appropriately, Lewis modeled Dr. Ransom after his dear friend J. R. R. Tolkien, for in the scope of its imaginative achievement and the totality of its vision of not one but two imaginary worlds, the Space Trilogy is rivaled in this century only by Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Readers who fall in love with Lewis's fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia as children unfailingly cherish his Space Trilogy as adults; it, too, brings to life strange and magical realms in which epic battles are fought between the forces of light and those of darkness. But in the many layers of its allegory, and the sophistication and piercing brilliance of its insights into the human condition, it occupies a place among the English language's most extraordinary works for any age, and for all time.

In Perelandra, Dr. Ransom is recruited by the denizens of Malacandra, befriended in Out of the Silent Planet, to rescue the edenic planet Perelandra and its peace-loving populace from a terrible threat: a malevolent being from another world who strives to create a new world order, and who must destroy an old and beautiful civilization to do so.

From the Amazon description of the 1996 Scribner hardcover edition