A Case of Conscience

A Case of Conscience is a science fiction novel by James Blish, published in 1958, and winner of the 1959 Hugo Award for best novel. It's an interesting and thought-provoking, though very flawed, book. It's normal, to be expected even, that as time passes earlier works of speculative fiction will become outdated, bypassed by events as they actually happened. What's unusual about A Case of Conscience that the one aspect which seems most anachronist now isn't the hard science aspects, or even the social ideas, though these can be pretty bad, but the theology. The problem is that the protagonist is a Jesuit who spends most of the book wrestling with problems of faith and doctrine, and this book was written ten years before Vatican II.

A Case of Conscience is a sort of prototypical work of social fiction. It deals with the social and moral implications of the discovery of a race of aliens, the Lithians, significantly described as being like giant serpents, who live in perfect harmony, with no strife, crime, social disorder, or disagreement of any sort, unable to even understand the idea of lying, but also with no conception of religion or art.

It is divided into two parts. The first, and much better part, which was published alone as a short story in 1953, deals with a four man team sent to the Lithian world by the UN world government to observe them and decide how humanity should deal with them. The team is a sort of abbreviated cross-section of humanity: Father Ruiz-Sanchez, the morally tortured Jesuit and biologist; Cleaver, an ugly American type who sees everything in terms of potential for weapons research and industrialization; Agronski, a confused proto-postmodernist who seems unable to form an opinion on his own; and Michelis, a stereotypically phlegmatic and thoughtful New Englander.

The second half deals with the social upheaval which follows the growth and maturation of a Lithian egg which the four scientists bring back to Earth with them. The people of Earth here live almost wholly underground, a move they made in response to the possibility of nuclear war, which is now obsolete since the UN runs everything anyway, but the "shelter economy" has become so entrenched there is no returning. This part comes off as an abbreviated, and even more morally and intellectually shallow and confused, version of Stranger in a Strange Land (which would be published three years later in 1961), except that Egtverchi, the Lithian interloper, is treated as an antagonist, and a relatively one-dimensional one. This part gets extra points off in my book for Blish's repeated indiscriminate use of the word "schizophrenia" as a catch-all for any kind of major mental illness, when he's usually talking about depression. The ending is a bit of a badly telegraphed anticlimax.

I'm not totally down on A Case of Conscience. It made me think, which is something I can respect, even though I disagree with most of its premises. On the other hand, what I can't respect are the novel's literary shortcomings, which become particularly overwhelming in the second half.

"A Case of Conscience" is a 1958 science-fiction novel by James Blish, detailing with earth contact of a seemingly utopian society of marsupial reptillians on a planet with a very different geology and biology than earth, as well as the psycholoigical and even theological dilemmas posed by a different evolutionary track. The book is divided into two sections, one telling the story of an earth expedition researching the new planet, the other telling the story of what happens when they return to earth with a young member of the reptillian species.

The main protagonist on the planet is Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a Jesuit priest and biologist. There are three other members of the expedition, with different viewpoints, but the focus is on Ruiz-Sanchez. Relatively quickly into the book, he finds out that the reptillians reproduce in an unusual way: they release their eggs into the ocean, where they hatch and become fish, with ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. I thought at first that the "Crisis of Conscience" was going to be him wondering how seemingly gentle aliens leave their young to struggle in the wild, but instead it makes him wonder if these aliens have souls, or have managed to form a rational society without any type of spiritual element. (And yes, this does seem like a bit of a jump). He becomes convinced that the planet is a creation of Satan, which furthermore makes him a heretic, because Satan can not create life. The second part of the book goes back to earth, where an egg of the reptillian gifted to Ruiz-Sanchez hatches and becomes a type of Antichrist, leading to the disruption of earth society of the time.

Sometimes when I am reading a science-fiction novel, I will read for a while, then flip to the title page and be surprised that it was written much earlier (or sometimes much later) than I thought. I did a double take when I found this was written in 1958, because it quite skillfully reconstructs an entire alternative society, from the basics of astronomy and geology. "Lithia", the planet of the reptillians, has a low amount of metals, and has a non-tilted axis in relation to its orbit, so it has little vulcanism and tectonic activity, and also no seasons or glaciation. How an intelligent, but very different, species could have developed, is described with great care, especially considering how much less was known about planetary formation and evolution in 1958. But after the book creates a believable planetary society, it then confuses the issue by making predictions about the future of human life that seem dated and quaint, with a humanity living inside of underground shelters. I never quite believed the basic idea that Ruiz-Sanchez would believe that a different race's biology or sociology would be literally Satanic. It seems quite a leap from "This race has a different biology and psychology" to "This is the devil's work".

As in many other science-fiction works, I would probably have to know more about the author's viewpoints to make sense of it: was he mocking the Catholic church, or was he himself making a conservative theological point? And, in either case, did he have an accurate view of how an educated Catholic theologian and scientist would view alien life? I don't believe he did. So, for these reasons, I agree with the write-up above this one: the first half of this book is a well-thought out and creative look at how astronomy, biology and psychology could all produce a sentient species that functioned very differently. The second half of the book has sociology and plotting that are much weaker, and much more arbitrary.