The Devil’s Lizards?

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

Illustration by Ed Emshwiller

Greetings and salutations! In this issue of the Official William Emmons Books Newsletter, we’ll be taking a look at James Blish’s 1958 novel A Case of Conscience about a Jesuit’s encounter with an alien world and a young alien’s encounter with the insane post-arms race society from whence the Jesuit comes.

I said A Case of Conscience is a 1958 novel but that’s only sort of true. It’s originally a novelette from the September 1953 issue of If Worlds of Science Fiction. Blish inserted the novelette as the first part of the novel and extrapolated the rest out from there. The book has some weirdness to it that I think is owed to being vivisected like this. I took it in as a 2008 Audible exclusive audiobook narrated by Jay Snyder.

The part that was published as a novelette works by itself. A Peruvian biologist and Jesuit called Father Ruiz Sanchez is a member of a UN team investigating a new planet dubbed Lithia inhabited by a sentient reptilian species. They’re as intelligent as humans or more so but their civilization looks different because of the differing minerals on Lithia—lots of lithium; hardly any iron—and because the way the Lithians reproduce precludes anything approaching the family.

For Ruiz Sanchez, there are two notable facts about the Lithians. First, despite their lack of religion, mythology, and stories in general, they have logically developed a system of ethics that seems to be a simulacrum of Christian ethics without God (as opposed to a simulacrum of Buddhist or Muslim ethics, etc.). Second, the way they have their young is an affront to the Jesuit’s creationist theology. When the young hatch they are simple animals that are wholly aquatic before becoming lung fish and then developing along the evolutionary ladder. Eventually young adults recognizable as members of the dominant sentient species emerge from the jungle and enter the cities ready for education having lived in the wild in every biome the planet has.

These facts taken together cause Ruiz Sanchez to conclude that all of Lithia is a diabolical creation designed to cause the human race to believe in a godless universe. As such, he believes that humans should never visit the planet again. For what it is worth, Ruiz Sanchez does note that Catholics are allowed to believe in evolution.

When Ruiz Sanchez explicated his views to his fellows on the UN team they are taken aback by his openly religious reasoning. Moreover, one of the other scientists correctly discerns that Ruiz Sanchez has committed the heresy of Manichaeism which in this instance means believing the devil has creative powers like those of God.

The other scientists are divided on what to do about Lithia. One trend wants to turn it into a giant factory for atomic weapons. Another believes there is much to be learned from intercourse between humanity and the Lithians and so wants to set up a way station on the planet.

Before the men—they, like most of the characters in this novel, are all men—depart Lithia to make their recommendation to the Security Council, a Lithian who is ostensibly Ruiz Sanchez’s friend gives Ruiz Sanchez a polychromatic ceramic vessel with his barely post-embryonic fish child swimming in it as a gift to take back to Earth. If I’m doing my comparison correctly, this is where the novelette ends. This is a powerful ending and Blish could have just left it there having hit enough notes sounding on speculative religion and biology to satisfy anyone.

That said, the remainder of the novel is rich in speculative sociology and mass psychology. It is also a continued character study of Ruiz Sanchez who is tortured about all of this and other members of the UN team who are transformed by their interactions with the growing Lithian.

The Lithian, named Egtverchi, seems to reach the young adult phase of development almost immediately after which he is granted citizenship by the UN world government. A quick study in the history and philosophy of humanity, Egtverchi soon becomes one of the most prominent people on the planet via his own television show.

Egtverchi is the metaphorical spark that lights a prairie fire. He is an outsider. His understanding of human hypocrisy leads him to a basically amoral worldview. These factors lead the disaffected in society to glom onto him enthusiastically.

For a century humanity has lived in something called the shelter economy. Following the arms race of the 1940s and 1950s, a shelter race began and humanity used all of its resources to build vast underground cities. Ultimately a new political system of balkanized shelter states united under aegis of the UN world government bureaucracy replaced the old systems.

The upshot is a mad society. With no real productive investment opportunities to speak of, the rich have nothing to spend their wealth on other than increasingly outré conspicuous consumption. The expanded novel is worth reading if only for an extended sequence at a countess’ extravagant party where she puts her guests on underground trolley cars and hits them with psychoactive gas.

What’s more, living and working underground has made an increasingly large proportion of the population deeply mentally ill. The book gives numbers but I don’t have a paper copy handy to reference. I want to say that something like a third of the population is walking around with a degree of schizophrenia that is functionally disabling. The government can’t take action to institutionalize these workers because they are too central to the functioning of the shelter economy—and, we should note, that for some reason, by 2050 the shelter society hasn’t developed a good way to treat people with schizophrenia that reaches a happy medium between abject neglect and forced institutionalization. One of the unhappy sufferers is a member of the UN team that accompanied Ruiz Sanchez and he dies when Egtverchi whips the paranoid masses into a global riot.

Moreover, the youth are disaffected and drawn to criminality for lack of anything better to do. Small children have become hateful. Egtverchi reports receiving letters from children as young as five who have real plans to kill their families.

As alluded to, the novel reaches hits a crescendo when Egtverchi calls for massive civil disobedience on his TV program. He says only to refuse, not to engage in violence but in practice he coordinates sabotage of critical infrastructure and his followers street fight with police and form lynch mobs hunting UN personnel. In the chaos that follows Egtverchi stows away on a faster-than-light UN ship bound for Lithia.

The other major thread of the expanded portion of the novel is Ruiz Sanchez’s trip to the Vatican where he expects to be put on trial for heresy. Instead, he receives a private audience with the Pope who chides him for his Manichaeism but shares his belief that the Lithians will lead the world to Armageddon. However, unlike the Jesuit, the Pope stays within Catholic doctrine and concludes that Lithia is a mere sending from the devil, an illusion meant to make humanity stray. While Ruiz Sanchez was instantaneously excommunicated without trial due to his admitted heresy, the Pope gives him dispensation to perform an exorcism against the whole planet of Lithia. The Pope tells Ruiz Sanchez not to return unless he is successful.

Meanwhile the UN has decided to turn Lithia into a giant nuclear power project—not exactly the bomb factory called for by some on Ruiz Sanchez’s mission but close enough. In the process of getting to business, the humans destroy irreplaceable natural and cultural wealth. Ultimately they build an experimental power plant that an important scientist and eccentric rich man who lives on the Moon believes will cause Lithia to explode.

This scientist has developed a hand wavey device that allows Ruiz Sanchez and others from the UN team to remote view Lithia’s final moments. Ruiz Sanchez privately reflects on how if medicine cures a sick child, God has still answered the prayers to cure that child. It is not for us to question the means God chooses to answer prayer. As the planet begins to glow white hot, Ruiz Sanchez performs an exorcism surprising and weirding out his colleagues. They leave him alone to feel sad after the planet explodes.

In the introduction to the edition I listened to, Blish argues that the book is “about a man” not about Catholic doctrine. But I really think this book is about how a certain religious person might act in a mostly secular society. In this sense, it is both “about a man” and about speculative religion.

Ruiz Sanchez is a protagonist whose reflections on reality are basically unreliable. He is a biologist who thinks that evolution is a trick from the devil. I don’t think the reader is supposed to be convinced that the exorcism he performs at the end of the book accomplishes anything except as a moment in Ruiz Sanchez’s character arc.

By contrast, Egtverchi comes across as a Miltonian Satanic revolutionary. Even Ruiz Sanchez’s secular colleagues, who abhorred Egtverchi’s actions, admit in the end that the chaos he created will be productive and that there’s no putting shelter society back into the bottle the way it was.

The novel’s basic sympathy for Ruiz Sanchez’s creationist delusions and basic antipathy toward Egtverchi cause me to find it unsettling and off-putting. To me, the basic villains here are the UN who force their own people to live underground and wantonly destroy an alien planet and its peaceful inhabitants. That said, written by someone with my preoccupations, it would have been a very different book and may not have clicked. It is good to be challenged by literature and I got a lot out of this very rich text.

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