A Case of Conscience
by James Blish
Summary
Father Ramon Ruiz Sanchez is a Jesuit and a biologist, one of four scientists sent to assess whether the planet Lithia should be opened to humanity. The other three are arguing about lithium deposits and industrial potential. Ruiz Sanchez has a theological problem.
The Lithians are twelve foot reptilian bipeds with a serene, rational, entirely benevolent society. They have no crime, no war, no property disputes and no religion of any kind, and their ethics, which match Christian ethics closely, appear to be innate rather than chosen. For a Catholic that is not a pleasant surprise but a trap: virtue without grace, arrived at without revelation, is precisely what the heresy of Manichaeism would predict, and Ruiz Sanchez concludes that the planet is a creation of the Adversary, designed to tempt humanity into believing morality needs no God.
He recommends the world be quarantined and shunned. The commission overrules him. And a Lithian gives him a gift to take home: a sealed jar containing a fertilised egg.
The second half follows that Lithian growing up on an Earth of underground cities and profound boredom, becoming a media demagogue.
Blish, who was not a believer, does the Catholic reasoning straight and lets Ruiz Sanchez be intelligent, sympathetic and quite possibly wrong, and the reader is never told which.
Around two hundred pages, and unlike almost anything else here in taking theology entirely seriously as a plot mechanism rather than as decoration.
The two halves sit oddly together, and the Earth section, with its underground cities and a demagogue on television, is much weaker than the Lithia section that precedes it.
Best for readers who want a first contact novel where the crisis is doctrinal, and a first rate moral problem in a short book.
Historical Context & Significance
A Case of Conscience won the 1959 Hugo Award for Best Novel. It grew from a 1953 novella of the same title, which forms the first half.
James Blish was a trained biologist who worked as a scientific writer for a pharmaceutical company and then for the tobacco industry, and he brought a technical seriousness to his fiction that was unusual for the period. He was also a formidable critic, writing as William Atheling Jr, and his reviews were hard enough on his contemporaries to cause lasting offence.
He is now most widely encountered through the Star Trek adaptations he wrote in the 1960s and 1970s, which for years were the main way fans could revisit the episodes between broadcasts, and through his four volume Cities in Flight sequence. He died in 1975.