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A Case of Conscience

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A Case of Conscience

By: James Blish
Narrated by: Jay Snyder
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About this listen

 Father Ruiz-Sanchez is a dedicated man - a priest who is also a scientist, and a scientist who is also a human being. He has found no insoluble conflicts in his beliefs or his ethics...until he is sent to Lithia. There he comes upon a race of aliens who are admirable in every way except for their total reliance on cold reason; they are incapable of faith or belief.Confronted with a profound scientific riddle and ethical quandary, Father Ruiz-Sanchez soon finds himself torn between the teachings of his faith, the teachings of his science, and the inner promptings of his humanity. There is only one solution: He must accept an ancient and unforgivable heresy -and risk the futures of both worlds . . .©1958 James Blish (P)2008 Audible, Inc. Adventure Science Fiction Space Opera Fiction

Critic reviews

Hugo Award, Best Novel, 1959

"Kudos to Audible Frontiers for carefully audiobooking this Hugo Award novel. A Case Of Conscience is an SF classic!" (SFFaudio.com)
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I read this a long time ago, and I think it's fair to say that I didn't understand it. I didn't have the knowledge of, or interest in, the religious and philosophical speculation it embodies. Now I do, and I realize why it's a classic, and why it remains controversial.

The story is in two parts, and the first part is the more engaging. It tells of the first human encounter of an intelligent alien species that has a sense of personal morality with no apparent religious belief. You have to have at least a minimum knowledge of Christian theology to understand why that would be such a challenge to conservative believers. The implications are worked out in the story in great detail, from a number of different angles.

The second part of the story, which I think Blish added later, is about the life of one of the aliens, having been raised on Earth. To be honest, I think the story would work as well without this part.

For oldies like me, it's good to be transported back in time to when we really thought that faster-than-light travel would be invented before digital electronics. The story is engagingly dated -- the space-ships carry magnetic tape recorders, for example. Many of the socio-political attitudes are also rather dated but, of course, the story is a product of its age, as every story is.

For the a book that explores similar themes, but in a more modern way, I recommend Mary Doria Russell's 'Children of God'.

But Case of Conscience remains a powerful and thought-provoking story, tor all its flaws.

A classic of speculative fiction

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A Case of Conscience is in two parts. Part one was originally a stand-alone story which I read in a compendium of SF back in the early 1960s. I remember it as thoughtful literature, which the teenage me did not really understand at the time, but did leave a feeling that here was a piece of serious and ‘grownup’ writing. Part two was written sometime later, and the two were then published as a contiguous novel.

For me, this book was a real disappointment. The ‘serious’ arguments in part one were long and convoluted; I could make no more sense of them now, than sixty years ago. Part two was such a mish-mash of different ideas and events, it was almost as though several stories got mixed up in an editing error. Academic and literary quotations sounded pretentious; the author’s note at the beginning was no help, and quite how the appendices were thought to add to the literary merit, I have no idea. Not recommended.

Very disappointing...

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