A Case of Conscience
by James Blish
1958, reprinted 2000
James Blish's A Case of Conscience falls into two categories of books I've semi-consistently been reading. The first is scifi novels whose alien species appear in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials. While I think artist Wayne Douglas Barlowe chose which aliens to paint based mostly on their aesthetic qualities, I do feel like the books themselves have generally been pretty good, and they're mostly moderately famous (or were at the time) as well. Poul Andersen's Fire Time and Hal Clement's Cycle of Fire are two of the most recent for me.
Conscience is also an example of the subgenre I call Catholic scifi, which combines the trappings of science fiction - space travel, alien planets, future societies - with questions of morality, and some of the weirdest, most esoteric ideas from Christian theology and mysticism. I don't think the authors or characters necessarily have to actually be Catholic, but in most of the examples you could find, they are. I don't know Blish's personal beliefs, but the main character here is a biologist who's also a Jesuit priest, sent into space as part of a team to help assess the habitability and suitability of the newly discovered world Lithia. After this, the Jesuit missionary / scientist will become almost a stock character in Catholic scifi, showing up, for example, in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Michael Faber's Book of Strange New Things.
Blish also went on to write for Star Trek, and I think you can see similarities between the post-WWII future histories laid out by both Conscience and Trek. I don't know if this is his direct influence though; it might just be convergence. In the same way that later scifi authors, at different times, seemed to agree that the future would surely involve AI super-intelligence and a technological singularity, and later that present society would collapse and usher in a post-apocalyptic authoritarian state, maybe authors of the late 1950s were convinced that the nuclear arms race would escalate along multiple fronts until only a unified Earth government, one with no rivals to use their bombs against, would be able to assure peace. But Blish doesn't foresee utopia. He predicts that the ultimate weapon would inspire a race to build the ultimate shield - enormous underground cities that are too expensive to abandon, even when peace is achieved, but whose isolation from nature drives their inhabitants to mass insanity. But I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself.
A Case of Conscience takes place in two parts. The first part takes place on Lithia, the second back on Earth. In part one, a small team of scientists studies the first alien planet humans have with intelligent life, then debate among themselves what to report back to Earth. In part two, they return home with a single alien egg. It hatches and develops rapidly, and the young alien becomes a planetary celebrity, and a populist, a demagogue. Broadcasts of the alien's speeches cause mass unrest and planet-wide rioting, and it uses the opportunity to steal a ship to go home. The ending is ambiguous. Lithia explodes just as the alien arrives, which is either a result of its malign influence on its home planet, an industrial accident from humans manufacturing weapons on Lithia, or because the priest performed an exorcism on the whole species.
The first part of the book on Lithia and the enigmatic ending are what Conscience is best known for, but I think Blish shines much more in part two, where he shows us a suffocating, technocratic bomb-shelter society, and pokes at its vulnerability to a charismatic cynic who gives voice to long-simmering grievances. Even before the riots, the demagogue easily mobilizes followers to harass the government and shout down opposition - and all to the benefit of the provocateur, not to the people.
The Jesuit priest eventually performs the exorcism because he's convinced that Lithia is an illusion created by Satan to trick humans into turning away from God. I won't lay out his whole argument, but importantly, the Lithians appear to all behave ethically by human standards, with no crime or misbehavior, no concept even of laws or rules, no gods, no religion, no spirituality of any kind. A planet where there is goodness without God convinces the priest that it's all an elaborate deception. When I took philosophy classes in college, they were full of thought experiments like this, where something impossible happens because of a demon or genie.
I do appreciate that at no point did Blish refer to the alien demagogue as an antichrist, because I might've thrown the book across the room if he did. That was maybe one of the few ways he showed any restraint in the religious aspects of his writing. The argument for Lithia's secretly evil nature is incredibly elaborate and relies on a lot of really specific (and, to my eyes, unconvincing) claims about theology. Blish's priest believes in a young Earth and creationism. The Lithian lifecycle appears to him as (false) proof of evolution, because they metamorphose a half-dozen times between hatching and adulthood, and each stage mimics a stage of their prior evolutionary history. That cycle is what Barlowe chose to illustrate. It's a cool image, but it's not so easy to understand what it's suppose to prove, or how it supports the priest's conclusions.
Blish also went on to write for Star Trek, and I think you can see similarities between the post-WWII future histories laid out by both Conscience and Trek. I don't know if this is his direct influence though; it might just be convergence. In the same way that later scifi authors, at different times, seemed to agree that the future would surely involve AI super-intelligence and a technological singularity, and later that present society would collapse and usher in a post-apocalyptic authoritarian state, maybe authors of the late 1950s were convinced that the nuclear arms race would escalate along multiple fronts until only a unified Earth government, one with no rivals to use their bombs against, would be able to assure peace. But Blish doesn't foresee utopia. He predicts that the ultimate weapon would inspire a race to build the ultimate shield - enormous underground cities that are too expensive to abandon, even when peace is achieved, but whose isolation from nature drives their inhabitants to mass insanity. But I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself.
A Case of Conscience takes place in two parts. The first part takes place on Lithia, the second back on Earth. In part one, a small team of scientists studies the first alien planet humans have with intelligent life, then debate among themselves what to report back to Earth. In part two, they return home with a single alien egg. It hatches and develops rapidly, and the young alien becomes a planetary celebrity, and a populist, a demagogue. Broadcasts of the alien's speeches cause mass unrest and planet-wide rioting, and it uses the opportunity to steal a ship to go home. The ending is ambiguous. Lithia explodes just as the alien arrives, which is either a result of its malign influence on its home planet, an industrial accident from humans manufacturing weapons on Lithia, or because the priest performed an exorcism on the whole species.
The first part of the book on Lithia and the enigmatic ending are what Conscience is best known for, but I think Blish shines much more in part two, where he shows us a suffocating, technocratic bomb-shelter society, and pokes at its vulnerability to a charismatic cynic who gives voice to long-simmering grievances. Even before the riots, the demagogue easily mobilizes followers to harass the government and shout down opposition - and all to the benefit of the provocateur, not to the people.
The Jesuit priest eventually performs the exorcism because he's convinced that Lithia is an illusion created by Satan to trick humans into turning away from God. I won't lay out his whole argument, but importantly, the Lithians appear to all behave ethically by human standards, with no crime or misbehavior, no concept even of laws or rules, no gods, no religion, no spirituality of any kind. A planet where there is goodness without God convinces the priest that it's all an elaborate deception. When I took philosophy classes in college, they were full of thought experiments like this, where something impossible happens because of a demon or genie.
I do appreciate that at no point did Blish refer to the alien demagogue as an antichrist, because I might've thrown the book across the room if he did. That was maybe one of the few ways he showed any restraint in the religious aspects of his writing. The argument for Lithia's secretly evil nature is incredibly elaborate and relies on a lot of really specific (and, to my eyes, unconvincing) claims about theology. Blish's priest believes in a young Earth and creationism. The Lithian lifecycle appears to him as (false) proof of evolution, because they metamorphose a half-dozen times between hatching and adulthood, and each stage mimics a stage of their prior evolutionary history. That cycle is what Barlowe chose to illustrate. It's a cool image, but it's not so easy to understand what it's suppose to prove, or how it supports the priest's conclusions.
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| A Case of Conscience lifecycle illustration by Wayne Douglas Barlowe |
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| A Case of Conscience adult Lithian illustration by Wayne Douglas Barlowe |
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