A Case of Conscience (After Such Knowledge, volume 3) by James Blish

[james_davis_nicoll]

A Jesuit little inhibited by actual Catholic doctrine wrestles with his fear newly-contacted aliens are a Satanic creation.

A Case of Conscience (After Such Knowledge, volume 3) by James Blish

Comments

[oh6]

I wonder if Ruiz-Sanchez is just some biologist who copes with the inhumane society on Earth by the delusion that he's a Jesuit. Possibly the Pope deals with a steady stream of such people, well-connected enough that he can't just refuse them without attracting unwanted attention. I guess this would require the Catholic Church to have declined considerably in prestige, but I'm willing to imagine that

The other portrayal of Catholicism in SF that I can think of is Thomas M. Disch's Camp Concentration. Disch actually was raised Catholic, but I don't know if it's any more accurate as a consequence.

[mmcirvin]

There's an extremely weird version of it in Dan Simmons' Hyperion sequence, speaking of strange reactionary science-fiction writers.

[mecurtin]

... and thanks to your comment I've just discovered that I've been thinking of Camp Concentration and A Case of Conscience as a. by the same writer, b. both part of "After Such Knowledge". To be fair to my brain, the authors' names rhyme, and that's a LOT of "C"s.

[neotoma]

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, though I haven't read it.

[voidampersand]

Mary Doria Russell was Catholic but left the Church. The Sparrow is an allegory about the good, the beauty and the evil of the Church.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Some of the characters in Julian May's Exile/Intervention/Milieu cycle are Catholic, and the construction of its universe is somewhat aligned with Teilhard de Chardin's rather oddball Catholic mysticism.

[(Anonymous)]

Don't forget Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz

Info about Case of Conscience of note:

From David Ketterer's "Covering A Case of Conscience" https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239480

When Blish published the novella "A Case of Conscience" in IF Worlds of Science Fiction in September 1953 he had no intention of carrying the story beyond what now appears as Book One of the novel version. There were, however, plans for the novella to appear as part of a "Twayne Triplet" (Twayne being the publisher) entitled Lithia. In fact, "A Case of Conscience" was originally commisssioned for this common-setting collection by Fletcher Pratt-which, according to Brian Stableford, was why Blish wrote so uncommercial a story.3 A letter in the Bodleian Library Blish Papers from one "Doc Clark" suggests that he was to be one of the contributors to this volume and that he first dreamed up a planet named Lithia: "you've taken my goddamned 'Lithia,' built to order for space opera, and have made a story on an intellectual level approaching that of Everest. "4 "Doc Clark" must be John D(rury) Clark, the physical chemist who had a hand in The Petrified Planet (1952), one of the two Twayne triplets edited anonymously by Fletcher Pratt which actually did appear. As an introduction, Clark provides a scientific description of the two worlds which figure in the three stories that follow (by Fletcher Pratt, H. Beam Piper, and Judith Merril): the silicone planet Uller and the fluorine planet Niflheim. Lithia, presumably, was to be the lithium planet. The Lithia triplet never appeared but in the meantime the magazine version of Blish's story had received praise not only within the SF community but from the respected literary critic Gilbert Highet in a letter to Blish dated 2 June 1954. Influenced by this response, Ian Ballantine, who had founded Ballantine Books in 1952, commissioned an extended version of the story and, in a letter to his agent, Frederik Pohl, Blish speaks in characteristically explosive (or is it inflationary?) terms of "blowing it up into a novel"

[james_davis_nicoll]

I had no idea this started as a Twayne Triplet!

[james_davis_nicoll]

Is there a canonical essay on the Twayne Triplets?

[(Anonymous)]

I drew the info from here https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/261013/authors-of-twayne-triplets

[oh6]

I guess it makes sense to mention Gene Wolfe in this thread, given that while the Catholicism is moderately dressed up in the New Sun / Long Sun / Short Sun books, it's pretty recognizable as such.

[(Anonymous)]

Most of John Whitbourn's works are set in the Catholic Europe of "A Dangerous Energy".

Tim Powers is a serious Catholic, and Catholic themes show up in his writing quite a bit.

William Hyde

[(Anonymous)]

Philip Henry Gosse was of a Protestant religious sect called the Plymouth Brethren. In addition to authoring Omphalos, he also hated Christmas and the Catholic Church.

On the subject of all feasts of the Church he held views of an almost grotesque peculiarity. He looked upon each of them as nugatory and worthless, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to him by far the most hateful, and nothing less than an act of idolatry. ”The very word is Popish,” he used to exclaim, “Christ’s Mass!” pursing up his lips with the gesture of one who tastes assafoetida by accident.

-- Edmund Gosse, writing about his father in Fathers and Sons