Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a Jesuit biologist, is one of four commissioners sent to the distant planet Lithia in 2049 to decide humanity's dealings with it. He finds the tall, reptilian Lithians a people of flawless reason and instinctive morality who have built a serene, harmonious civilisation entirely without religion, guilt or God, and this perfection appals rather than reassures him: he becomes convinced the whole world is a snare, a seamless demonstration of virtue without grace that could only be the handiwork of Satan. Departing, he is entrusted with a Lithian egg by his friend Chtexa. James Blish, expanding a novella into the first volume of his loosely linked After Such Knowledge sequence, treats theology with unusual rigour, taking his priest's crisis of faith as seriously as any scientific problem. When the offspring, Egtverchi, matures amid the anxieties of an Earth living in underground shelter-cities, the book turns from first contact to a study of belief under strain. It is finally less about aliens than about conscience itself, and whether reason and faith can survive an encounter with a genuinely innocent world.
