ZB5

Enjoyable, but not a read that would keep you up late into the night. This might be a good book to recommend to some friends I have to introduce them to Science Fiction in ways they wouldn't expect it. ( )

Although influenced by Voyage to Venus by Lewis, Blish takes the opposite tack - what if, instead of alien races having in their own separate evolution of high intelligence come to a fully theological position, contact was made and the race concerned was intrinsically 'unfallen', replete and both perfectly functional and functioning perfectly without any inkling of God? It's good to revisit this novel in the current climate of religious and secular/atheist fundis - again literature appears to be a far more useful and subtle place for this debate than polemic or our daily media ( )

I agree with the reviews that claim this is 'two novels in one' (and historically this seems to be the actual case). The first half is difficult, but adult, mature, and highly thought-provoking. The 'Case of Conscience' in question is that of Fr. Ruiz-Sanchez, the Jesuit scientist who accompanies the mission to Lithia, to determine if the planet of peaceable and cultured lizards can be admitted to intergalactic society.

This first half needs re-reading several times to grasp all the subtleties of its theological arguments, and those are well expressed in other reviews. But it should also be said that this is an examination of obsession : Ruiz-Sanchez pursues his awkward and debatable suspicions in the face of rational evidence, coming to a most irrational (unless you are a Roman Catholic theologian) conclusion, then standing by it in the face of all rational arguments to the contrary.

Blish has never been one of my favourite SF writers, but this is possibly his most mature work; it would have been interesting to see how the same subject would have been handled by JG Ballard, as this first half novella is markedly Ballardian in its theme and scope.

The second half of the book is quite obviously a separate work - the actual story is described in other reviews here - and fits more into the 'dystopian Earth' genre that began to emerge in the 1950s and is still with us today (witness the success of TV remakes such as "Survivors").

But it doesn't really fit with the first half - the only rationale I can think of is that Ruiz-Sanchez is set up as the 'judge' of a seemingly utopian alien society, while his own culture has deteriorated into sleaze, celebrity, trivia (eerily prescient of the Western world pre-2001).

Overall, this is a hugely original piece of work, dealing with topics that were unexplored in SF at the time of publication, and still worth reading today. However, as has been remarked here already, please bear in mind that it is really two different novels spliced together. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1148681...

It's a curious assortment of several different stories set in 2050, with the two big factors in the plot being the Roman Catholic church (which Blish mostly gets right) and the alien planet of Lithia, which is an oddly perfect society. It is certainly, in intellectual terms, far ahead of a lot of the sf circulating in the late 1950s.

But I think it misfires crucially on a couple of points. The first is the decision of the central character, the Jesuit Ruiz-Sanchez, that the Lithians are the direct creation of the devil. This is crucial in plot terms but (as the Pope points out to him in a later chapter) theologically very dubious. And although the presence of an alien child on Earth results in an effective and comprehensive breakdown of the human social order, I'm not completely clear on whether we are meant to think this is actually a Bad Thing; Blish's future Earth is more repressed and more debauched than ours, beyond the point where one can see it as an allegory, which means that we readers are a bit adrift as to what he is trying to say.

If the story were written today, the key character would be Cleaver, who deceives his exploratory mission colleagues, sees Lithia as a strategic military/industrial asset, returns to it to rape it of its resources, and, at the end, inadvertenty destroys it.
A Case of Conscience remains a decent effort to inject serious religious debate into the genre, but it is overshadowed by later efforts. ( )