How long does it take to read Out of the Silent Planet?
Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis takes about 3 hours 11 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
Book 1 of The Space Trilogy
Next: Perelandra
About 3 hours 11 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1938. 174 pages, about 47,850 words.
7 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 19 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 11 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours |
The page count is the median across 65 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The first book in Lewis's Space Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet tells the story of Dr. Elwin Ransom, a philologist who likes to explore the English countryside on foot. Seeking out a place to stay the night, he ends up at the estate of a colleague who is away in London. However, the house is not empty. Ransom stumbles upon the plot of a megalomaniacal scientist and his collaborator, who just happens to be an old schoolmate of Ransom's. Drugged, kidnapped, and wisked away in the scientists rocket to the planet Malacandra where he is to serve as a human sacrifice, Dr. Ransom escapes into the strange Malacandran wilderness pursued by his kidnappers and abandoning his hopes of returning to Earth. Ransom discovers that the inhabitants of Malacandra are not what his kidnappers believed them to be. In his adventures in the often strangely beautiful, sometimes dangerous, and sometimes surprisingly familiar Malacandra and its inhabitants, Ransom uncovers information about the larger universe and Earth's place that suggest he has as much to discover about his home planet as he does about the alien Malacandra.
Subjects: Linguists, Elwin Ransom (Fictitious character), Philologists, Science fiction, College teachers, Life on other planets
