Perelandra
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Perelandra (also titled Voyage to Venus in a later edition published by Pan Books) is the second book in the Space Trilogy of C. S. Lewis.
The story begins with the philologist Elwin Ransom, some years after his return from Mars at the end of Out of the Silent Planet. With angelic help, he travels to Venus, a new Garden of Eden with a new Adam and Eve, to oppose the diabolically inspired human physicist Professor Weston who is tempting the Eve figure. His mission accomplished, he returns, rather reluctantly, to Earth to continue the fight against the forces of evil on their own territory.
Venus is described as an oceanic paradise. One day is about 23 Earth hours, in contrast to Earth and Mars with their 24 and (roughly) 25 hour days. The sky is golden but opaque, and the ocean is dotted with floating rafts of vegetation; strange, mythical creatures roam the seas. These rafts look like small islands, and actually have plant life growing on them; however, due to the ocean underneath, they are in a constant state of motion like in an earthquake. Ransom quickly meets the Eve of the planet; unlike the inhabitants of Mars in Out of the Silent Planet, she is human (because Maleldil became a man), but with green skin. She speaks the same Old Solar language that the hrossa of Mars taught to Ransom, so they are able to speak to each other. She mentions an island not far from there which, unlike all the floating rafts that Ransom has seen so far, is "fixed"... in other words, it is a real island, like on Earth. However, she mentions that she and her husband, the Adam of the planet, were forbidden to go to sleep on the island.
The tricky part of the story comes when Professor Weston arrives in a spaceship and lands on the island. He at first announces that he is a reformed man, but is obviously unconvincing; he still seeks power, but in a different way. He gets into a heated argument with Ransom, and gets angry, going so far as to invite demonic possession. However, his prayer is quickly answered as he sustains a fatal injury. Ransom flees; a demon enters into Weston who resurrects as a zombie or "Unman" and finds the Eve, trying to tempt her into spending a night on the island. Ransom meanwhile must act as the counter-tempter when he encounters them.
A key sequence of the story involves Ransom getting into a climactic fight with the Weston zombie, and both end up sinking into the ocean, coming up in a subterranean cavern. There, the zombie is finally killed, and a period of physical and mental rest in a healing grove, and climaxing with a vision of the essential truth of life in the Solar System, and possibly of the nature of God: strongly parallelling the journeys of Dante in the Divine Comedy.
Perelandra was published in 1943, one year after A Preface to Paradise Lost, and it deals with many of the same issues: the value of hierarchy, the dullness of Satan, and the nature of unfallen sexuality, for instance. To an extent, it can be viewed as a commentary on Milton's poem but a commentary which is intelligible to a reader ignorant of the original.
The third volume of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, is set on Earth and, perhaps inevitably, has rather a different tone than the prior two volumes; Ransom is a key character but is "off-stage" for much of the action.