The Reading Canary: a Reminder

Series of novels - especially in fantasy and SF fiction, but distressingly frequently on other genres as well - have a nasty tendency to turn sour partway through. The Reading Canary is your guide to precisely how far into a particular sequence you should read, and which side-passages you should explore, before the noxious gases become too much and you should turn back.

After Such Knowledge: Religious SF

James Blish's After Such Knowledge trilogy continues the exploration in SF of religious themes pioneered by the likes of David Lindsay and C.S. Lewis. It takes its title from a quote from T.S. Eliot ("After such knowledge, what forgiveness?") and is based around the theme of secular knowledge - is it good or bad, on a religious level? At least, according to Blish that is - as I found, the theme of the books tended to stray from the central strand a lot. Although normally cited in the chronological order of publication - A Case of Conscience first, The Day After Judgement at the end, Blish actually had his own suggested reading order, beginning with Doctor Mirabilis and ending with A Case of Conscience, and that's the order I'll review them in here.

Doctor Mirabilis

Blish's story of the life of Roger Bacon is, Blish admits, heavily fictionalised - necessarily so, given the sketchy nature of the source material - and is thus more of a biographical novel than a biography per se. In the appendix Blish, in a display of intellectual honesty alien to a great number of pseudohistorical fiction writers these days, makes it clear which portions of the text are his own invention and which are not; he also presents explicitly the argument he makes implicitly throughout the novel.

Doctor Mirabilis, you see, is as much a hagiography as it is a biography. It is James Blish making the case that Roger Bacon was an integral figure to the development of modern, empirical science. Here, knowledge - genuine, tested, reliable knowledge, as opposed to garbled, corrupt quotations from unproven authorities - is considered to be an unabashedly good thing. It is ignorance and - worse still - inaccurate received wisdom which holds Bacon back at every turn. The argument is convincing and engaging, although Blish stretches a little too far when he tries to convince us that Bacon posited the luminiferous ether and the Einsteinian space-time continuum. Furthermore, in the course of this Blish underemphasises the scientific contributions of Robert Grosseteste (who, as Bacon's mentor, helped with Bacon's pioneering work on optics) and Albertus Magnus (who is presented as a colossal fraud).

The major flaw of this book is that it only really becomes focused fairly late. Like A Case of Conscience, it reminds me of a short story which has been expanded needlessly. The early incident in which Bacon goes off on an adventure to reclaim his family money from the despoiled Bacon manor seems rather pointless; the same could be said for the extended treatment of Bacon's comrade Adam Marsh's experience in the court of King Henry, except that those portions of the book at least have some meaning in the end; by the time Bacon dies Marsh and his mentor Grossteste's causes have won through, albeit after Marsh and Grossteste have passed on, just as the cause of empiricism will flower centuries after Bacon dies.

Easily the most interesting and absorbing feature of Doctor Mirabilis is the success with which it presents the medieval scholastic worldview. Bacon (early on, at least) is an avid follower of Aristotle, and his sense of self is shaped in Aristotlean terms - he believe that he has multiple different types of soul, for example, and he considers his ego (referred to as his "Self") to be a nasty little voice trying to convince him to do wrong. In particular, the scene in which Bacon faces off against Albertus Magnus in an academic debate is especially intense, although I don't know nearly enough about Aristotle to follow it closely. This is one for fans of The Name of the Rose - Blish even indulges in Eco's bad habit of having long segments of the book written in Latin without any translation; while Blish does promise in the introduction to give the reader a rough idea of what the Latin parts mean, he often doesn't do a very good job of it. Nonetheless, Doctor Mirabilis is far and away the best book in the After Such Knowledge trilogy, and is the novel where Blish stretches himself the most; he never, to my knowledge, wrote anything else quite like it.

Black Easter and The Day After Judgement

Although these were originally published separately, it is clear from Blish's afterword in my edition that he originally considered Black Easter, or Faust Aleph-Null and The Day After Judgement to be two halves of the same novel. I'm not sure whether it was a wise idea to provide a sequel, though: The Day After Judgement significantly lessens the impact of Black Easter, and doesn't really add much. (Most modern editions I am aware of compile the two novels, occasionally under the combined title of The Devil's Day.)

Blish's aim with these two novellas seems to have been to write a gentle parody of C.S. Lewis and Dennis Wheatley. The essential concept is that the sort of ceremonial magic described in medieval grimoires is genuine, and really can summon demons from the depths of Hell. Blish assures us that all the grimoires he cites and rituals he describes in both books are real (in the sense that the grimoires and rituals physically exist, not in the sense that they're actually effective), but he's carefully left out details so as not to give complete instructions on how to cast any of the spells described. This is the sort of Dennis Wheatley disclaimer which means absolutely nothing - the genuinely interested occultist could just look up the books that Blish cites, and the fact that crucial details are missing from the descriptions of the rituals isn't going to stop people from being offended by the likes of Black Easter if they want to; the disclaimer serves only to say "Oooh, spooky real magic! This is Serious Business!"

On to the story itself. Black Easter revolves around the efforts of Mr Baines, an international arms dealer, to convince the black magician Theron Ware to work for him so that Consolidated Warfare Services, Baines' company, can add demonic forces to its arsenal. Entranced by the destructive potential of demonkind, Baines asks Ware to let loose the full forces of hell for 12 hours. This idea proves to be as catastrophically stupid as it sounds, and Armageddon happens - only God loses, because the Book of Revelations turned out to merely be propaganda for the divine cause as opposed to a genuine prophecy of the future. Ware, Baines and co are left sitting in their magic circle in the wreckage of World War III, waiting for the goat-demon Baphomet to come back and eat them. Edgy, but kind of cool. In The Day After Judgement, most of the impact of the shocking end of Black Easter is blunted - World War III wasn't quite as bad as it was cracked up to be, the demons don't quite have the free reign they claimed they had, and while God is absent an inherent divine principle in all things traps Satan and his forces to fulfilling the divine plan anyway.

Blish maintains a grim sense of humour throughout all this - Satan, when he gives his concluding speech, talks in Miltonian verse, and the names of the various white magicians associated with the Monte Albano monastery seem to be based on the names and pseudonyms of various SF authors, including Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny (here as "Selahny"), and William Atheling Jr. - James Blish's very own pseudonym which he used to write SF criticism. At the same time, while Blish obviously keeps considering turning proceedings into a farce - Doctor Strangelove meets Doctor Faustus - he never quite gets around to it. If we're meant to take this book seriously, then at some point the perils of secular knowledge and the relationship between religion and science really ought to be pondered at some point, especially since otherwise the books wouldn't fit into the After Such Knowledge sequence. Unfortunately, aside from a few token attempts, Blish never really gets to grip with the issue. We could, of course, regard the demonology of Black Easter to be a metaphor for weapons of mass destruction, and the defeat of God they cause to be a defeat of civilisation - and therefore religion (and perhaps life itself), a dawn of a new dark age in which the secular knowledge so hard-won is lost forever. This analysis is unfortunately undermined in The Day After Judgement, when the secular might of the US Strategic Air Command is sent against the demonic city of Dis, only to prove futile. Or maybe the demons represent the dark side of religious knowledge - superstition and ignorance? But surely secular knowledge has the potential to free us from superstition just as it has the potential to snuff out enlightenment?

The conclusion of The Day After Judgement - a restatement of the tired old chestnut "oooh, you see, you can't have evil without good" - leaves me wondering precisely what the point of the whole enterprise was. If Blish had stopped at Black Easter this segment of the trilogy might have been more incoherent, but the back-peddling and contradiction of The Day After Judgement sours proceedings.

A Case of Conscience

A Case of Conscience is the volume of After Such Knowledge which has won the most critical acclaim - it won the Hugo Award, and is in print to this day in the SF Masterworks collection - and although I think Doctor Mirabilis attained greater heights, A Case of Conscience certainly lacks the filler that afflicted Mirabilis or the confusion which muddled Black Easter/The Day After Judgement.

The book is in two parts. In part one, Jesuit priest and accomplished biologist Ruiz-Sanchez is part of a four-man scientific mission to the newly-discovered planet of Lithia, a place which seems too good to be true: a happy, peaceful society, with high technological accomplishments and a large stockpile of materials which can be used by the Earth government to make horrific super-weapons. Excellent choice for economic partners, right? Except Ruiz-Sanchez comes to believe, during the course of the trip, that the Lithian society which he finds so enchanting, the Lithians whom he has struck up personal friendships with, and the Edenic planet of Lithia as a whole, is part of a monstrous deception by Satan, a creation of the evil one designed to undermine man's faith in the principles taught by the Catholic Church. (This sounds a lot less mad in the novel.) This position, of course, is heretical - Satan has no powers of Creation, only God can make things, and so Ruiz-Sanchez is putting himself in trouble with his superiors just by making that assertion. Unable to convince his fellow scientists to support a blockade of the planet, Ruiz-Sanchez leaves the planet to face the judgement of the Jesuit order - but as he leaves, he is given a gift by the Lithian Chtexa. This is an egg, inside of which is Chtexa's son - Chtexa wants him to grow up on Earth and learn the ways of humans. Ruiz-Sanchez shits a brick.

The second part revolves mainly around the exploits of Egtverchi, Chtexa's son. The experiment of bringing Egtverchi to Earth proves to be a disaster - while he inherits knowledge of Lithia from his DNA, Egtverchi is monumentally screwed up as a result of his upbringing on Earth, and his presence proves to be devastatingly disruptive to Earth society at that. The Earth presence on Lithia turns out to be disastrous as well, and by the end of the novel we realise that Ruiz-Sanchez was right to demand a blockade of Lithia - although whether he was correct for the right reasons we never do know. (Incidentally, the Pope forgives Ruiz-Sanchez, and points out that the existence of Lithia does not necessarily validate the Manichean heresy of dualism - in the Pope's view, Lithia is not a creation so much as it is a deception, an illusion, but Ruiz-Sanchez cannot simply write off the alien friends he made there as illusions, even though he does believe that they are inventions of Satan.)

What I will say about A Case of Conscience is that the themes of culture clash and extraterrestrial colonialism it explores go well beyond the essentially religious themes of the After Such Knowledge sequence, and as such it's probably the most broad and diverse book in the sequence - and could well be the best one to start with, despite Blish's recommending order, especially considering its wide availability.