James Nicoll Reviews

James Blish’s 1958 A Case of Conscience is a Hugo-winning science fiction novel. It is part of a thematic trilogy, After Such Knowledge, about which more later.

No sooner did Haertel give humans faster-than-light drives¹ than humans discovered that they share the universe with aliens as intelligent as humanity. Aliens such as the Lithians.

Father Ruiz-Sanchez is part of a four-man UN team assigned the task of assessing recently contacted Lithia. Is the planet and its highly intelligent natives an opportunity for Earth to exploit? Is it a deadly menace? Or perhaps someplace to ignore…

Jesuit Ruiz-Sanchez fears it is a deadly menace. He also fears his reasoning will not sway his teammates.

Despite being slighter larger than Earth, Lithia’s surface gravity is slightly less. This is due to a comparative lack of heavier elements. Humans may be able to thank this compositional curiosity for the fact that it was humans who discovered Lithia and the Lithians rather than the other way around. Lacking iron, Lithian technology developed along different lines than human.

What concerns the Jesuit is not Lithian technology but rather Lithian morals. In all ways, the Lithian virtues are a close match for Christian virtues. They arrived at this state of affairs without any hint of religion. The Lithians appear to be governed entirely by logic.

For Ruiz-Sanchez, this is extremely suspicious. There are many religions. The Lithians reasoning their way to Christian values in particular seems very unlikely. Surely, the planet is a trap set by the Adversary to tempt humans into thinking grace is possible without faith! Therefore, the UN should permanently quarantine the planet.

This pious argument fails to sway the Jesuit’s secular colleagues. Paul Cleaver in particular is keen to see the planet exploited. Lithia’s abundant light metals make it an ideal place to construct H‑bombs. The fact that the UN has no enemies at present is no excuse to refrain from assembling a vast arsenal against enemies, internal and external. Nor are the lack of enemies, basic economics, or common decency reasons to refrain from enslaving the Lithians if they object.

The quartet return to Earth, where Cleaver seems certain to sway the UN. Ruiz-Sanchez is summoned to Rome, where Pope Hadrian VIII is keen to discuss with the Jesuit the finer details of Catholic theology, in particular those pertaining to the heresy the Father has just committed. The Adversary is not creative; therefore, he could not have created Lithia. Furthermore, there was an obvious course of action the Jesuit overlooked.

Accompanying the four humans is a Lithian named Egtverchi. Shipped to Earth as an egg, the Lithian hatches and as his kind does, rapidly matures into an adult. Egtverchi is the first of his kind to be raised away from Lithian society. How will this affect Egtverchi? More importantly, how will the increasingly irritable, judgmental Egtverchi affect a dangerously unstable Earth?

~oOo~

I completely forgot the degree to which the plot involves Kids These Days and How They Should Get Off James Blish’s Lawn. We’re not in The Star Dwellers territory, but that future development is visible from A Case of Conscience.

Conscience won the Hugo, elbowing aside Heinlein’s Have Space Suit — Will Travel, Sheckley’s Immortality, Inc, Anderson’s We Have Fed Our Sea (variant of The Enemy Stars), and Budrys Who? I suppose it was a weak year, but if I had to select a winner from those books, I’d have gone with the Heinlein.

ISFDB lists Conscience as the third book in the After Such Knowledge trilogy, along with Doctor Mirabilis, and The Devil’s Day AKA Black Easter/The Day After Judgment. Odd, because Conscience was the first of the three to be published, and as this is a thematic trilogy, internal chronology should not matter.

While I am marveling at curious decisions, SF Gateway’s Blish Omnibus curiously collects two of the After Such Knowledge novels but omits Conscience in favour of the considerably less notable The Seedling Stars… despite referencing A Case of Conscience in the blurb as one of Blish’s notable works.

I have no idea what selection process would select this particular team to assess an alien planet or why a cursory visit would be deemed sufficient. This is early in interstellar exploration, but surely even limited experience would be sufficient to see the problem with sending, to pick one example, a warmonger who can’t be bothered to learn the language of the aliens he is assessing.

Even though I am (as previously established) not Christian in general and have absolutely no connection to Catholicism in particular beyond everyone on my mother’s side being Catholics and my aunt and mother both having been nuns, but even I spotted some pretty dubious assertions about Catholic doctrine, starting with Catholics having apparently rejected evolution in favour of Gosse’s Omphalos hypothesis. This wasn’t Catholic doctrine even when Blish was writing.

Blish reportedly reacted to criticisms by asserting that his novel dealt with future doctrine, but the Vatican having rejected Gosse centuries ago, the Omphalos hypothesis does not seem likely to be something a Pope might embrace in the future. Blish would have been better to make Ruiz-Sanchez a Protestant².

Events towards the end of the novel suggest that Ruiz-Sanchez might have been correct after all. However, it is also possible to read the events of the novel in a different way. Neither the Jesuit and the Pope consider the possibility that the Lithians are an unfallen species, which is why their virtue is effortless. This implies that humans are the serpents in the Lithian’s paradise.

The evidence supports this hypothesis better than it does Ruiz-Sanchez’s. The Earth we see is a hell, the entire population confined to underground Shelter-cities constructed during the Cold War. Many humans appear to be borderline mad. The net effect of the chaos Egtverchi catalyzes on Earth is to force the UN to stop deferring replacing the Shelter culture with something better suited to human nature. The net effect on Lithia of contact with humans is much grimmer.

Which reading is the correct one? Luckily, you can decide for yourself, as this venerable novel is still in print.

A Case of Conscience is available here (Open Road Media), here (Orion Publishing Group), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Blish was a self-declared Fascist. I always wonder if his sneering comments about how Einsteinian relativity was superseded by Haertel’s relativity reflected antisemitism (perhaps this was the case with Petr Beckmann, another anti-relativist). I don’t know of any reason to think Blish hated Jews, but I also am unaware of any exculpatory evidence. Even if there were, fascists lie.

Haertel as the inventor of faster-than-light drives turns up across Blish’s oeuvre, even in books that cannot be in the same continuity. Is this character a gloss on some real-world scientist? Or a literary reference? 

2:. There are tens of thousands of Protestant sects, new ones forming every day, so speculating that a future sect would have the beliefs the plot requires isn’t that unreasonable. I suspect Blish felt Jesuits have a gravitas that someone from a minor cult would not.