Book Review: A Case of Conscience

James Blish

1958

Awards: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

A Case of Conscience begins with biologist and Jesuit priest Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez at the very end of a stint on the planet Lithia. He is there as part of a team of four scientists whose assignment is to evaluate the planet and give it a rating as to its usefulness and hospitability to Earth.

                                                                                    

Lithia has a hot, muggy, tropical climate. It has abundant plant and animal life, including one intelligent animal species: twelve-foot tall reptiles who stand on their hind legs like Tyrannosaurus rex.

The Lithian natives’ most remarkable characteristic is that they rely completely on logic and reason. They have no faith or belief system of any kind. This, of course, bothers Father Ruiz-Sanchez quite a bit, just on principle. But what really throws him for a major loop is that they don’t seem to need to have faith to have a successful, ethical society. The Lithians have a stable, technologically advanced, cooperative, crime-free culture, more disciplined and peaceful than ours on Earth, with no reliance whatsoever on religion.

This leads Ruiz-Sanchez to the conclusion, naturally, that Lithia and all its life forms are creations of the devil. “Only the children of God,” he says, “had been given free will, and hence were often doubtful.” Since the Lithians are not beset by doubt–in other words, they aren’t bothered by “night thoughts” such as: Why am I here? What is the purpose of existence?–they must not be children of God, and are therefore children of Satan.

In fact, he posits, Lithia may be a new devilish garden of Eden, with the Lithians as the snakes in the garden, testing us, exposing our weaknesses, founding their society on pure logic to make us question our faith.

This makes it easy for Ruiz-Sanchez to decide how to rate Lithia: total quarantine. STAY AWAY.

But, unfortunately, his theories also put him in really bad stead with his church. In Catholic theology, only God has the power to create life. So if Ruiz-Sanchez believes that Lithia was created by the devil and that, therefore, the devil has “creative” power, Ruiz-Sanchez is thus a heretic, and will have to be tried in Rome and probably excommunicated.

Ruiz-Sanchez’s life gets even more complicated when one of the Lithians gives him a hatchling—a baby Lithian—as a farewell present, and he is honor-bound to take it back to Earth with him. On Earth, it grows rapidly into a twelve-foot-high lizard without the ethical code of its parents, gets itself a national TV talk show, and begins fomenting unrest among the ever-present third or so of humanity that feels cut off from society’s dominant cultural traditions.

A Case of Conscience is a short little book that raises big issues. On the back cover of my library's 2000 paperback edition, the Science Fiction Encyclopedia says that it was “one of the first serious attempts to deal with religion in SF, and remains one of the most sophisticated.”

I think that is probably still true, and I respect it for that. My problem is that I just wasn’t that thrilled with the story. The plot felt aimless and unresolved. It neither answered the questions it brought up nor left me with a deliberate ambiguity out of which I could draw my own conclusions. It seemed like it was trying to do both, and did neither satisfactorily.

I also didn’t really like the main character or his friends. And I didn’t wholeheartedly buy the motivations of the hatchling, the priest’s enemies, or the society at large.

Occasionally, I run across memorable plot elements in older SF novels that appear (albeit sometimes somewhat altered) in later pieces of fiction. In each case, it always makes me wonder if it is just a coincidence or if the more recent authors either consciously or unconsciously adapted them from the earlier books.

A minor one in this book was a scene in which the main character uses mutant bees to protect himself from marauding foes, which also happened in a key scene in The Hunger Games.

But most strongly, this book kept reminding me of Orson Scott Card’s far more satisfying Speaker for the Dead. That book, too, had a quasi-religious figure as the main character who was trying to make sense of an alien world. And in both cases, the indigenous intelligent species native had a unique biology, in which they took very different physical forms as they progressed through different life stages. If Card did borrow consciously from Blish, he certainly did it in a way that not only honored the original ideas but also greatly improved on them.

This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Rite of Passage

Alexei Panshin

1968

Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

The main character of Rite of Passage is a twelve-year-old girl, Mia Havero, who lives on a spaceship with her father and a couple tens of thousands of other people. They live on the ship, wandering across the galaxy, because 160 years ago Earth was rendered unfit for human habitation in some kind of apocalyptic war. The war's survivors fled in ships; intellectuals (like Mia’s forebears) stayed aboard, and less skilled, less educated people settled on various colony planets.

The ships and the colony planets have had a strained relationship ever since, one in which the ships get goods and materials from the colonies and the colonies get a teensy bit of carefully doled-out technological help in return.

Because space on the ships is finite, overpopulation is a potential problem. Ship residents learned hard lessons from overpopulation on Earth (which is sort of implied to be the cause of the war) and have taken measures to keep their numbers constant. One such measure is that when any child turns fourteen, they have to go through a Trial: they get dropped on a random colony planet, raw and wild and backward, and have to last there, alone, for a month. If they survive to be picked back up by their ship, they are adults with full voting rights. If they don’t, well, then, they don’t. It’s a bit far-fetched and passive-aggressive as a method of population control, but there it is.

Mia is precociously smart, self-reliant, and inquisitive. She is also undisciplined (by either her absent mother or her preoccupied, hands-off father), obnoxiously prejudiced about people who are different than her, and more than a little bit antisocial in the way she thinks only about herself. She doesn’t know, and doesn’t seem to really care, how her rude and snotty comments hurt others.

                                         

This book is billed as a sympathetic coming-of-age story, in which our heroine starts out as a naïve child in a cloistered world and then is forced to grow up and conquer her fears and preconceptions through a series of challenges. But it comes off more as the story of a self-centered girl who gets away with a lot of insensitivity by being brash, plucky, and resourceful. And maybe learns a little bit of tolerance at the end, in spite of herself.

Mia’s challenges start when her father gets elected to the chairmanship of the Ship’s Council, and they have to move to a new level of the ship away from all her friends. At first she thinks that all the people on her new level are stupid, but eventually she fights, bullies, and daredevils her way into the good graces of a new group of friends and realizes that maybe they’re pretty much the same as the people she knew on her old level.

Her second challenge is when her father brings her with him on a diplomatic trip to the colony planet of Grainau, where she first meets some of the planet-dwellers that she and her friends have grown up calling “Mudeaters.” She meets colonist kids who think she is snotty (which she is) and self-centered (which she is) and part of a system that denies them access to technology that would help them advance (which she is) and she, in turn, thinks that they’re grubby and smelly and stupid and wear weird clothes. She doesn’t really leave the planet having changed her mind about any of this.

Mia’s training for trial, which starts a year and a half before Trial itself, brings on more challenges, including proving herself to a new group of peers and, somewhat randomly, learning to ride a horse, building a log cabin, and killing a tiger. It is pretty taxing, and I guess there is a sense of victory in it when she accomplishes each of these things, but it doesn’t seem to teach her to be any less opinionated or any more aware of others.

And, finally, at fourteen, Mia goes through her Trial itself. She is dropped onto the colony planet Tintera and discovers that the people there are Free-Birthers, which means they go having children willy-nilly as much as they want, and she is appalled by that. She runs afoul of a bunch of nasty road bandits who destroy her homing beacon, and she is angry at that. She meets locals who seem like they are enslaving the indigenous semi-intelligent life forms, and she is disgusted by that. But, all in all, it is oddly anti-climactic; it doesn't seem all that much harder than any of the challenges she faced on the ship when she was younger.

And she also doesn’t go back to the ship all that much changed. She does run into the elderly Tinterian Mr. Kutsov, who provides her with her obligatory example of the Kindly Mudeater, letting her hole up in his house for a couple weeks. But she later abandons Mr. Kutsov, and then witnesses him being beaten to death by the police, which doesn’t do much to alleviate her prejudice of planet-dwellers in general. And she does rescue her friend Jimmy, also on Trial on Tintera, who has been clapped into jail by the colonists when he was spying around one of their military yards, and who, conveniently, still has a working homing beacon. But she still says and does things that hurt him and offers little in the way of apology.

2312: A Valentine's Day Card to Our Solar System

Kim Stanley Robinson’s outer-space novels allow us to picture what would happen when real humans, governed by real physical laws, colonize our solar system. Implementation takes decades or even centuries. Ships and living spaces are designed for material and budgetary constraints, not efficiency or safety. There are bugs, mistakes, disasters. Sometimes people just have to suck it up and patch it up as they go, working with what they have. Robinson’s books are completely grounded in hard science and imperfect reality. 

And yet he describes the facts with art and imagination to create settings that are not only completely believable, but also surreal and unbelievably beautiful.

And maybe that’s his point: our universe is amazing. No enhancements needed to make it so.

So, in celebration of my appreciation for our universe, and, in particular, our solar system, on this Valentine's Day, here are some of my favorite scenes from Robinson's most recent novel, 2312. (Warning: there are some spoilers in here.)

Scene: Surfing Saturn's F Ring

“Soon after that they took a shuttle to Prometheus, the inner shepherd moon of the F ring. The gravitational sweeps of Prometheus and Pandora, F’s outer shepherd moon, changed in relation to each other in ways that ended up braiding the F ring’s billions of ice chunks into complex streamers, very unlike the smooth sheets of the bigger rings. In effect the F ring was being swirled in the tides created by its two shepherd moons, making for some waves. And where there were waves, there were surfers...”

“They jetted closer and closer to the white wall, until Swan could see discrete ice chunks very clearly, ranging in size from sand grains to suitcases, with the occasional chunk of ice furniture—desk, coffin—tumbling in the midst of things. Once she saw a temporary agglomeration about the size of a small house, but it was coming apart even as she spotted it.”

“Swan tested her jets as she flew toward the wave, pressing with fingertips like a clarinet player, jinking forward in a little sashay of her own device…she focused on the approaching wave, which was lifting up and over her like Hiroshige’s wave; this one was ten kilometers high, and rising fast. She needed to turn and accelerate in the direction it was going, but not so quickly that she stayed ahead of it. This was the tricky part—”

“Then she was in the white stuff and being struck by the bits. She jetted a bit to keep her head out of stuff, as if bodysurfing out of a spume of broken salt water, but it was chunky stuff and she felt herself being thrust forward by little hits from little bits, rather than a mass of water. Then she was at speed with the wave, her head emerging from it so she could look around—very like bodysurfing, and she had to laugh, she had to shout; she was flying in a wave of ice ten kilometers high. She hooted at the sight, she couldn’t help it. The common band was raucous with the other surfers’ yelling.”

Scene: Floating in Space, Waiting for Rescue, after Ejecting from Doomed Ship

“They floated there in the starry night… The Milky Way was like a skein of white glowing milk, with the Coal Sack and other black patches in it even more black than usual. Everywhere else the stars salted the blackness so finely that the black itself was compromised—as if behind the black, pressing intensely on it, was a whiteness greater than the eye would be able to take in. The pure black in the Milky Way must indicate a great deal of coal in the Coal Sack. Was all the black in the sky made by dust? she wondered. If all the stars in the universe were visible, would the night sky be pure white?”

“The big stars seemed to lie at different distances from them. Space popped as she saw that, became an extension outward rather than a backdrop hanging a few kilometers away. They were not in a black bag, but an infinite extension. A little reckoning in a great room.”

Scene: The Re-Animation of Earth

“They all came down together, first in big landers protected by heat shields, then in smaller landers popping parachutes, then in exfoliating balloon bags. At that point they were drifting down through the airspace the Inuit nation had given them permission to cross. When they got within a few hundred meters of the ground, every lander disintegrated into thousands of aerogel bubbles drifting down, each transparent bubble a smart balloon holding in side it an animal or animal family. What the animals thought of it was anyone’s guess: some were struggling in their aerogel, others looked around placid as clouds. The west wind had its effect, and the bubbles drifted east like seed pods. Swan looked around, trying to see everywhere at once: sky all strewn with clear seeds, which from any distance were visible only as their contents, so that she drifted eastward and down with thousands of flying wolves, bears, reindeer, mountain lions. There she saw a fox pair; a clutch of rabbits; a bobcat or lynx; a bundle of lemmings; a heron, flying hard inside its bubble. It looked like a dream, but she knew it was real, and the same right now all over Earth: into the seas splashed dolphins and whales, tuna and sharks. Mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians: all the lost creatures were in the sky at once, in every country, in every watershed. Many of the creatures descending had been absent from Earth for two or three centuries. Now all back, all at once.”

Scene: Viewing the Sunset on Titan

The sunset on Titan is eighteen hours long.

“Titan is larger than Pluto, larger than Mercury. It has a nitrogen atmosphere, like Earth’s but ten times more dense…on the surface all the water is frozen very hard and forms the material of the landscape—glacial to every horizon, with rock ejecta scattered here and there like warts and carbuncles. Here methane and ethane play the role of water on Earth, changing from a vapor in the nitrogen atmosphere to clouds that rain down into streams and lakes running over the water ice.”

“No impact craters; as they are formed in ice, the ice then deforms and resurfaces as the centuries pass. There is only a convoluted, swirling chaos of broken ice features and rock outcroppings, cut by liquid methane into shapes like watersheds. Dips in the land are filled with liquid methane: Titan’s Lake Ontario is three hundred kilometers across, and shaped like the one on Earth....”

“The three of them donned suits and left the spaceport city, called Shangri-La, by way of a gate at the northern end of the city tent. They walked a few kilometers north on a broad track, ramping gradually up a tilted glaciated plain to an overlook. Here a broad flagstoned area made a kind of open plaza, overlooking an ethane lake. The metallic sheen of the lake reflected the clouds and sky like a mirror, so it was a stunning plate of mixed rich color, gold and pink, cherry and bronze, all in discrete Fauvist masses; really nature had no fear when it came to spinning the color wheel…Gibbous Saturn flew through the clouds above, its edge-on rings like a white flaw cracking that part of the sky.”

Lord of the Pugs

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Book Review: 2312

Kim Stanley Robinson

2012

Awards: Nebula

Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Kim Stanley Robinson writes long books. While there are, from time to time, exciting sections, you cannot count on them for constant page-turning action. They are not taut, fast-paced thrillers. And his central characters tend to be opinionated, idiosyncratic, aloof people who have difficulty getting along with others.

But what Robinson lacks in breathless plot pacing and likeable characters he makes up for—in spades—with his imaginative, vivid, and realistic descriptions of other moons and planets, the colonies we humans build in those places, and the remarkable but completely conceivable technology it takes to create and maintain those colonies. No one does a better job at this than him.

2312 is true to Robinson form in all of these ways. It is a good story—not fast moving, generally, but it keeps you interested enough, and there are several parts that are actually quite exhilarating. There are loads of excellent, realistic off-Earth locations and ingenious, not-so-out-of-reach machinery. And the love story is surprisingly touching.

~

The year 2312 comes almost two hundred years after our successful colonization and terraformation of Mars. During that time, human exploration has spread; there are colonies and, in some cases, the beginnings of terraformation on Mercury, Venus, and several of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. We have also hollowed out the insides of thousands of asteroids and turned them into mobile, steerable, life-supporting terrariums, which we use simultaneously as space transport vehicles and as biomes for preserving extinct and endangered Earth flora and fauna.

For, sadly, in spite of our success in greening and animating much of the rest of the solar system, we have just about destroyed our home planet. By 2312, global warming, in combination with massive overpopulation, has had catastrophic effects, which Robinson depicts with depressing realism. Earth’s ice caps have completely melted except for two small, carefully tended glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. Sea levels have risen more than thirty feet, so that Florida and all of the South Pacific islands and the bottom several floors of all of Manhattan’s skyscrapers are under water. Forests have turned to grasslands, grasslands to deserts. Earth is full of poverty, disease, and sharply divided classes of haves and have-nots.

Ironically, the geoengineering that we are doing everywhere else in the solar system won’t work on Earth—the ecosystem is too complex. The bombardments, sunshields, and gas emissions that we’re using in other places would upset the delicate balance of life that is left.

And the incredible political bickering on Earth leads only to indecision. Earth needs an ecological revolution, but the people of Earth variously can’t see it, can’t accept it, and can’t agree on what is needed. So nothing gets done, and the situation gets worse.

~

The first person we meet in 2312 is Swan Er Hong, currently residing in Terminator, a domed colony city on Mercury. At a spry 137 years old, Swan has been a designer of asteroid terrariums, an architect of cities and landscapes, a terraformer, and a visual artist.

Swan is also kind of a mess as a person. She is brash, whiny, cranky, and impatient. She has a tendency towards depression, self-mortification, and self-punishment. She berates herself about early biome designs that seem misguided to her now. She has a cantankerous personal Artificial Intelligence computer (or “qube”) implanted in her head; she once injected herself with alien microbes from Europa for a high without knowing what the consequences might be; she had treatments to implant animal genes into herself so she can sing like a lark and purr like a cat.

But what prevents her from being completely unappealing is that, at the heart of it all, she loves life. She appreciates everything: the croaking of frogs, the wind, the sun, the soil. She can be happy living for days out in the wild of a terrarium, following a pack of wolves. She likes risky sports and other activities that drive her to the limits of her endurance, because they make her feel fully human and alive.

At the beginning of the book, Swan’s beloved grandmother Alex has just died. While Swan is trying to grieve, her grandmother’s associates come to Terminator from across the solar system to pull her into the project that her grandmother had been working on.

                       

Which, Swan learns, wasn’t just ordinary terraformation research. It turns out that Swan’s grandmother had an all-encompassing, Seldon-esque theory of power in the solar system, which predicted that the instability on Earth would eventually lead to a crash, which would in turn mean disaster for the entire Earth-dependent solar system. And her grandmother had enlisted others across the space colonies to help her with an ultra-secret project to save Earth—“to help Earth cope with its problems by ecological means.”

Swan isn’t actually all that thrilled about being sucked into this project until catastrophe hits her personally. The city of Terminator, which Swan helped to design, is built on rails that circle the entire circumference of Mercury at a single latitude. As the planet rotates through its extremely slow day, the tracks in the daylight behind the city heat up and expand, pushing the entire city down the rails towards the night side, where the tracks are cooling and narrowing. In this way, the city is constantly moving, constantly staying slightly ahead of the deadly radiation of the Mercurial sunrise.

One night Swan and Fitz Wahram, a big lumbering co-worker/co-conspirator of her grandmother’s from Titan, go outside the city, farther ahead into the night side, to a concert. As they are returning, a meteor hits the tracks in front of the city, destroying the rails and forcing the city to stop. Terminator’s human residents are all able to evacuate in emergency shuttles, but when the sunrise finally hits the stalled city, everything else—buildings, gardens, forests, animals—burns to the ground.

Swan & Wahram are able to get to an underground conduit and walk for over a month to the nearest shelter where they can be rescued. During the time they are in the conduit, the Interplanetary Police discover that it was not a meteor at all, but a very cleverly disguised missile attack by someone who wants to subvert their project.

The rest of the book is a combination of intense cross-solar-system geoengineering and crime-solving challenges for Swan. She and Wahram and the rest of her grandmother’s allies struggle to get past sabotage, terrorism, and interplanetary politics to reverse the damage to Earth’s ecosystem, while at the same time trying to track down the forces against them and prevent them from doing even more harm. It starts getting particularly sinister when it appears that the relatively new AI “qubes” may be involved in the sabotage—because, of course, Swan has one of them implanted in her brain.

Eventually Swan and her cohorts decide that the time has come to force her grandmother’s revolution on Earth, whether it wants it or not.

I won’t describe what that revolution is here, but I will say that it is a beautiful thing. And that, in contrast to the ideal Hollywood narrative, but in keeping with both Robinson’s style and the way things really work, it is hard to definitively call it either a complete success or a complete failure.

Jabba the Persian

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