A Case of Conscience - Reception

Reception

While faulting the novel for "extreme unevenness," Galaxy reviewer Floyd C. Gale concluded that A Case of Conscience was "a provocative, serious, commendable work" and characterized it as "trailblaz". Anthony Boucher found Blish's protagonist "a credible and moving figure," and praised the opening segment; however he faulted the later material for "los focus and impact" and "wander" to an ending that seems "merely chaotic." In his "Books" column for F&SF, Damon Knight selected Blish's novel as one of the ten best science fiction books of the 1950s. He reviewed the novel as "resonat with a note of its own. . . . it is complete and perfect."

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