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After Such Knowledge Series

This series delves into the darker aspects of the human psyche and ethical quandaries, often set within a dark fantasy and horror-tinged landscape. The narratives explore profound questions of faith, power, and the consequences of pacts with malevolent forces. Readers can expect a blend of intellectual depth, thrilling plot developments, and an unsettling atmosphere. It's a collection that prompts reflection on the nature of evil and the limits of human agency.

The Devil's Day
A Case of Conscience
The Day After Judgement
Black Easter
Doctor Mirabilis

Recommended Reading Order

  1. 1

    Doctor Mirabilis

    • 318 pages
    • 12 hours of reading
    3.5(15)Add rating

    Blish created a trilogy, each volume of which dealt with an aspect of the price of knowledge, & gave it the overall name of After Such Knowledge (from a T.S. Eliot quote). The 1st published, A Case of Conscience (winner of the '59 Hugo Award as well as 2004/1953 Retrospective Hugo for Best Novella), showed a Jesuit priest confronted with an intelligent alien species, apparently unfallen, which he eventually concludes must be a Satanic fabrication. The 2nd, Doctor Mirabilis, is a historical novel about the medieval proto-scientist Roger Bacon. The 3rd, actually two short novels, Black Easter & The Day After Judgment, was written using the assumption that the ritual magic for summoning demons as described in grimoires actually worked. In that book, a powerful industrialist & arms merchant arranges to call up demons in the midst of a modern world crisis, resulting in nuclear war & the destruction of civilization. Black Easter is devoted to that element of the plot; The Day After Judgment is devoted to exploring the consequences of the destruction of the world, with an extraordinary ending in both narrative & theological terms.

    Doctor Mirabilis
  2. 2

    Black Easter

    • 176 pages
    • 7 hours of reading
    3.9(750)Add rating

    A novel about a practitioner of witchcraft who is asked to use his powers to kill a powerful politician

    Black Easter
  3. 3

    The Day After Judgement

    • 118 pages
    • 5 hours of reading
    3.7(305)Add rating

    The day after judgment follows Black Easter (1968) and the bedlam to follow is Screwtaped via arguments and computer-scanned via machinery. Some of the same characters appear, black magician Theron Ware and munitions maker Baines who speculate whether that other Maker will intervene and whether the world almost destroyed is overrun by demons. Philosophical and theological arcana in a sometimes hard-to-crack nutshell but excitingly projected.

    The Day After Judgement
  4. 4

    A Case of Conscience

    3.7(5585)Add rating

    Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez S.J., is a part of a four man scientific commission to the planet Lithia, there to study a harmonious society of aliens living on a planets which is a biologist's paradise. He soon finds himself troubled: how can these perfect beings, living in an apparent Eden, have no conception of sin or God? If such a sinless Eden has been created apart from God, then who is responsible? Winner of the Hugo Award for best novel, 1959.

    A Case of Conscience

Related books

  • The Devil's Day

    • 10 pages
    • 1 hour of reading
    3.9(161)Add rating

    A bored weapons entrepreneur enlists the greatest black magician of all time to perform a magical feat of stupendous proportions, and only one man--a simple Italian monk--feels the imminent danger. But the holy man must stand and watch helplessly as the magician unleashes the most powerful demons of Hell onto an unsuspecting world.

    The Devil's Day