by James Blish
The history and destiny of a planet Lithia that is 50 light years from Earth and Sol. Lithians are very intellectual creatures. They are pure logical to the bone. It affects their social life to which an untrained Earthman feels repugnance. Thanks to the overdrive that can span time, men travel ther...
Simply splendid. First half is set on alien world, narrating survey team's agon, wherein one faction wants to exploit the world as a colony, one guy wants to shut it down as a secret military installation and reduce aliens to involuntary servitude, and priestly protagonist wants to quarantine the w...
I loved the first half of this book. The second half I found unreadable. I have since heard that the first half is essentially the original novella and the second half was added later to bump it to a novel. This makes sense as the style and quality is wildly different.
One of the best works of science fiction ever written. Posits a number of intertwining questions about faith, reason and morality and then refuses to answer them. Very very good and there should be more of this kind of thing in science fiction. Has realistic characters with a realistic psychology...
An interesting book that explores the implications on religion of finding sentient alien life, in particular, on the Catholic faith.What if an alien species were discovered that lives in perfect peace and harmony? They are entirely rational and never let their emotions get the better of them. They d...
This review contains spoilers for several of James Blish's novelsI discovered James Blish when I was about 10 (I believe the first one I read was The Star Dwellers), and I have returned to him many times throughout my life. I don't think I know any author who is quite as frustrating an example of Ki...
Reviews of past books:This was one of the earliest science fiction novels I read (because of Blish's Star Trek novelizations, I began to read his other work as well). It was the first where religious reasoning played a major role. I read it at about the same time as Clarke's Childhood's End, and bec...
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