Creatures Of Satan?

(For me, evenings at home can be a conflict between continuing blogging and turning to other reading, which can turn out to be relevant for blogging in any case. This evening, I am keen to return to the new Le Carre book so there might not be quite as many posts here as there are sometimes.)

Fr. Axor:

"'...I cannot believe the Merseians are creatures of Satan...'"
-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER TWENTY, p. 426.

Axor unwittingly - and Anderson wittingly?- summarizes another sf novel. In A Case Of Conscience by James Blish, another Catholic priest concludes that another alien race has literally been created by Satan. The Lithians are not evil. The problem is that they are good without God which should be impossible unless they have been diabolically created to mislead mankind. The image shows the edition in which I first read A Case Of Conscience.

The Game Of Empire is part of the History of Technic Civilization. Flandry's Legacy is Volume VII of The Technic Civilization Saga, the first complete collection of the Technic History. A Case Of Conscience is Volume III of the After Such Knowledge Trilogy and also a volume of the Haertel Scholium, a non-linear future historical sequence. Each of these works takes its place as part of a greater whole. We can now contemplate Anderson's and Blish's complete works. I blog more about Anderson because his output was so immense.