Cities In Flight (Cities in Flight, #1-4)

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Cities In Flight (Cities in Flight #1-4)

3.91 of 5 stars 3.91 · rating details · 2,466 ratings · 72 reviews

Cities in Flight is an omnibus volume of four novels, originally published between 1955 and 1962, two of which are fix-ups of pieces that first appeared in various magazines in the early '50s. Despite having been conceived more than 50 years ago, and produced in episodic fashion, they stand head and shoulders above most SF available today.

In They Shall Have Stars, humanki

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Published by Gollancz (first published 1970)

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Jun 24, 2009 The other John rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sf, discarded

This sucker is actually four novels collected into a single volume. The collection starts with They Shall Have Stars. The year is 2013 and humanity is out among the solar system while, back on Earth, a quiet struggle is going on between the West and the Soviets. It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between the two, however, as the Western governments seek to impose more and more control on their populace. Amidst this all is a scheme of Alaskan senator Bliss Wagoner, which is pla...more

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Mar 20, 2008 Roger rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: teens+

I first read these books longer ago that I usually admit to being alive. I think they had a profound influence on me. Having said that, and having reread them recently I have to say they are really bad in places. Characters are cardboard stereotypes for the most part and the story really betrays that it was written as magazine serials so things pop up that really ought to have been mentioned earlier.

So what's good about them? Well this is 'hard' science fiction. You get formulae to describe the...more

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Mar 21, 2013 John rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Cities in Flight" is the collected name of four short novels. It was written by James Blish over the course of about 15 years in the 1950's and 60's. To me, it is one of the best science fiction books of the Campbell period.

In the early 21st century mankind simultaneously discovers the ability to control gravity, making faster-than-light travel possible, and drugs which eliminate all disease, thereby extending the life to thousands of years or longer. An initial wave of explorers set off from E...more "Cities in Flight" is the collected name of four short novels. It was written by James Blish over the course of about 15 years in the 1950's and 60's. To me, it is one of the best science fiction books of the Campbell period.

In the early 21st century mankind simultaneously discovers the ability to control gravity, making faster-than-light travel possible, and drugs which eliminate all disease, thereby extending the life to thousands of years or longer. An initial wave of explorers set off from Earth, establishing colonies throughout the stars. But, the Earth itself collapses into chaos shortly afterwards for several centuries. When the combination of discoveries is revived again upon Earth, circumstances are so desperate that spindizzies— the machines that make control of gravity possible— are mounted underneath whole cities, providing the cities with an opportunity to leave the Earth and roam the stars looking for work. (The spindizzies also generate a shield retaining heat and oxygen.)

The first novel tells the story of how the original discoveries were made. The second tells the story of how one man came to leave the Earth in one of the last cities to take flight. The third and longest novel is told from the point of view of the Mayor of New York City as he guides the city around the stars for centuries, taking contracts among the many colonies scattered about and keeping the city in flight. The fourth novel continues the story of the citizens of New York as they confront the end of the universe.

I find the concepts that built these novels to be fascinating. Certainly a modern writer, making a living selling science fiction would never limit himself to four short novels as Blish did. The possibilities are endless. These novels, like those of Heinlein, are filled not just with science fiction, but with political, economic, and societal speculation as well. Though the prose style and many of the characters seem dated, there is still much wonder and delight to be had.(less)

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Nov 11, 2012 Kevin Rubin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Cities in Flight" is hard science fiction, with hard science, chemical formulas and mathematical equations tossed in to clarify concepts the characters talk about. It's four related stories. One thing to remember while reading this is, it was written before Sputnik.

The first begins in the early 21st century, with the Soviet Union subtly winning the cold war by "sovietizing" the west, that is, the west is so secretive now, it's behaving like everything they're fighting in the Soviet Union. One r...more "Cities in Flight" is hard science fiction, with hard science, chemical formulas and mathematical equations tossed in to clarify concepts the characters talk about. It's four related stories. One thing to remember while reading this is, it was written before Sputnik.

The first begins in the early 21st century, with the Soviet Union subtly winning the cold war by "sovietizing" the west, that is, the west is so secretive now, it's behaving like everything they're fighting in the Soviet Union. One rebellious, but powerful senator organizes a lot of scientific and engineering research knowing that the west will collapse soon and opening up the stars for travel and colonization.

The research culminates in a biological compound to keep people from growing old and dying, and in an antigravity device to move objects in space, with a long, engineering and political name, but which everyone simply call spindizzies.

The second story opens up about 1100 years later, when whole cities pack up as space ships, using spindizzies, and take off as migrant workers to look for work out in other star systems.

The third story gives a bit of history of space flight and the science behind it. Blish does get some future predictions wrong (again, written before Sputnik) about how the Soviet Union was against space flight as then the unhappy people would leave.

Overall the third story was the weakest. It was like a bunch of episodes of Star Trek mashed together as mayor Amalfi leads the Okie city, New York, on various adventures, from one narrow escape from disaster to another. They were all over the galaxy and I found it incredibly hard to keep track of time and distance.

Some aspects felt very out of date now, in the early 21st century. For instance, now we're used to all large air craft having identifying signals, but in this space craft as large as New York City have nothing like it.

For now it was all too much and I didn't enjoy the 3rd story, so I'll skip the 4th and come back to it in a few months. The first two were definitely the strongest, good characters and good plots.(less)

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Mar 14, 2012 Brenda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'd like to give "Cities in Flight" -- an omnibus volume of four related novels that were themselves serialized stories -- a five star review. Certainly when I was young, I devoured the books; they alternately frightened me and inspired me. The nihilist ending of "The Triumph of Time", the last book in the volume, stays with me to this day. However, it's never able to escape being swamped by the social, political and technological advances since the book's publication.

In the very near future (ie...more

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Feb 12, 2012 Kolya Matteo rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

The first two novels (They Shall Have Stars, and A Life for the Stars) were the best. The third novel, Earthman, Come Home, was munged together from a variety of stories which were written years earlier than the other novels, which were written as novels. As a result, ECH suffers from a lack of plot arc, bad pacing, anticlimaxes, and is riddled with internal inconsistency. The author had some work to do on comprehending his scales, also (a major point is the difficulty of fitting 300 city-sized...more

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Feb 19, 2013 Anthony Pacheco rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Anthony by: A very attactivve librarian in a sundress.

Shelves: science-fiction, young-adult

The description for this omnibus states "For readers of a certain age, this was probably the 1st SF they encountered written from a mature standpoint & adult sensibility."

This was certainly true for me. For the longest time this was my favorite book, ever, but, as time as gone by, the latest re-read reveals this book is aging and is less sophisticated than I remember.

What still holds up is the characterization and the way the series ends. The last 1/3 of the last book is simply amazing. It's...more

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Apr 01, 2013 Kate Sherrod rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Oh man, if I had known from the beginning just how literally this title, Cities in Flight, was meant -- I took it to feature the word "flight" in the sense of fleeing pursuit, rather than maneuvering through air or space -- I would have attacked this book a lot sooner. That's one of the disadvantages of scooping up a whole lot of ebook titles at once; if you don't examine the cover art, you're just going on author and title unless you take the trouble to look up the blurb. And the author.*

Cities...more Oh man, if I had known from the beginning just how literally this title, Cities in Flight, was meant -- I took it to feature the word "flight" in the sense of fleeing pursuit, rather than maneuvering through air or space -- I would have attacked this book a lot sooner. That's one of the disadvantages of scooping up a whole lot of ebook titles at once; if you don't examine the cover art, you're just going on author and title unless you take the trouble to look up the blurb. And the author.*

Cities in Flight is actually an omnibus edition of four novels Blish published in the 1950s: They Shall Have Stars, A Life for the Stars, Earthman Come Home, and The Triumph of Time. I could have read them discretely as I often do with such collections, but I found the central conceit of these stories -- that a pair of technologies developed in the early 21st century allowed entire Earth cities like New York and Los Angeles and Pittsburgh and Scranton to lift themselves bodily, buildings, subways and all, from the planet's surface and go into space as giant spaceships** -- so compelling that I just kept right on going after the first novel, which detailed the development of the twin technologies, a gravity defying/harnessing field called the "spindizzy" and anti-aging drugs, that would allow this weird feat to be possible. Rather than just function as an elaborate prologue to the "real" narrative of the spacefaring cities, though, They Shall Have Stars is a great novel all on its own, as I'll get to in a bit.

But first, I want to share this cool fan-made video by Charlie McCullough. Just because it sells the concept so marvelously, and is cool in its own right:

Cities In Flight from Charlie McCulloch on Vimeo.

But so anyway, the novels. These span from the political/budgetary machinations that made the spacefaring "Okie" cities possible, to a tale of a young man kidnapped by the departing city of Scranton, Pennsylvania who later rises, out in the galaxy, to become a man of some importance after he is traded off as useless to New York, NY, to the story of the mayor of New York's thousand-year reign and the tribulations faced by a city whose motto "Mow your lawn, lady?" encapsulates its willingness to do any crappy job, anywhere in the universe, in a universe whose economy is collapsing, to that same city's final establishment as actually being the center of the universe that many of us assume New Yorkers think it to be anyway. Heh.

So, this one has a lot in common with Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, except its eons of time are spanned by a single generation of essentially immortal human beings, which means it has characters of a kind, but don't go looking here for people you'll love or hate or feel like you know. Blish is interested in charting a vast future history, just as Stapledon was; he just chose to give it a slightly more human scale for the benefit of his readers. So Senator Bliss Wagoner's story of secret research projects and financial shenanigans bleeds into Chris DeFord's rise to prominence bleeds into John Amalfi's tribulations at the helm of the city so nice they named it twice bleeds into Amalfi and a bunch of pseudo-cosmologists doing pseudo-cosmology until the reader's face melts... They could just as easily all be the same guy. Why they're not is anybody's guess. But that's okay. What these novels lack in character they make up for in grandiosity, imagination and occasional goofiness -- as well as the odd (and I do mean odd) moral dilemma of a kind that could only occur when big industrial cities are out in the universe doing odd jobs, planet by planet, solar system by solar system.

And hey, if you're going to do science fiction, might as well really freaking do science fiction, right?

*I have mostly known Mr. Blish as the constructor of novelizations of episodes of Star Trek (original series). He did this very competently, no complaints, but since the reader already knew the story from having seen it enacted by Shatner and Nimoy et al, his skill and imagination were eclipsed by memories of Shatner and Nimoy et al. At least they were for me. But then there was Spock Must Die! And Spock's Must Die! was more than a bit brilliant, and it was on the strength of this (and the inclusion of two Blish works in the SF Masterworks series) that made me want to read the man's "own" work.

**Doctor Who fans will be hopping up and down and screaming about The Beast Below, and surely that episode owes a lot to these novels. No starwhales, though.(less)

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Mar 16, 2011 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi

As a pure science fiction collection, this was first rate. I really enjoyed the science involved. The authors of the 60s really stick to what is plausible, even though it may not be probable. Today's science fiction involves too many impossibilities. For example, Star Wars and Star Trek gave us noisy explosions in space, ships and people rocked and shimmied in zero gravity. The vacuum of space became of none effect. The authors of the past adhered to physical realities and where those were bent,...more As a pure science fiction collection, this was first rate. I really enjoyed the science involved. The authors of the 60s really stick to what is plausible, even though it may not be probable. Today's science fiction involves too many impossibilities. For example, Star Wars and Star Trek gave us noisy explosions in space, ships and people rocked and shimmied in zero gravity. The vacuum of space became of none effect. The authors of the past adhered to physical realities and where those were bent, they justified them by proving their theories with plausible explanations, James Blish does this convincingly.

Cities in Flight is a collection of 4 related stories. The first, They Shall Have Stars explains the dual development, scientifically and politically, of the Dillon-Waggoner Gravatron polarity generator, or Spindizzy, and the anti-agathic drugs that made space flight possible. The Spindizzy allows large bodies to travel through space at almost any imaginable speed, the potential speed relating to the size of the body. With Spindizzy technology, whole cities and even planets could be hurled through space. The science behind the Spindizzies are carefully explained and at least seem plausible.

One aspect of potential space travel that modern writers/directors avoid is the amount of time, even at fantastic speeds, space travel takes. It would be futile to send out generations of people through space, even to the nearest star, with no possible life other than breeding and dying. The author also had to construct a way to increase the life-span to hundreds or thousands of years, hence the development of the anti-agathic drugs. The drugs and the Spindizzies combine in the stories to make space travel possible.

The sad aspects of the story involve the realization of how little progress has been made. The story begins in 2013 where humans have colonized the other planets and have begun exploiting their resources. In actuality, the promise of the space program has been squandered and has died with 2012 seeing the retirement of the shuttle Discovery and the death of NASA as a reasonable tax expenditure. Instead of reaching for the stars, humans, and Americans especially, have given up on such endeavors.

One possible reason for this is the introversion and self-centerndness of modern man. The advent of the personal computer, Facebook, GoodReads, MP3 players, and Je-jaws (cell-phones) have created a generation of spoiled children. We have become isolated in our own little worlds and fail to even notice or care about what is out there. The computer has stagnated our collective minds by not requiring us to think. One of the climaxes in the book involve the falling out of two of the main characters John Amalfi, the mayor of New York, New York and the city manager, Mark Hazelton. When Hazelton resigned he accidentally left his slide rule on the dinner tray and it was swept away to the incinerator before John could save it. All the complex computations were made with the slide rule and Marks mind. Today, it would be impossible.

The first book describes the death of the scientific method. It died under its own weight. We have experienced that in the real world where today's scientists try to conform their data to fit a preconceived consensus. Data is rigged to show the expected outcomes based on political agendas and popular mythology like global warming, rather than letting the data speak for itself.

As space, through the Spindizzies, and time, through the anti-agathics are conquered, the spacemen eventually come to feel like they are gods. When the planet He, moving though space discovers the end of time, they position themselves to create their own worlds. While this makes for a good story, it bogs down in its own theology. In this type of world, only the elites have access to their salvation, only they are smart enough to understand. Of course, God in his wisdom has a much simpler plan that everybody, even a child can understand. Don't look for answers to the meaning of life in this book, it isn't there. The Triumph of Time will come when Christ returns and establishes his earthly kingdom.(less)

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Apr 09, 2009 Valerie added it · review of another edition

I'm not sure which of these I've actually read--when I was young, my father used to go to used book stores every week, buy about a dozen books, bring them home, let us all read them, sell them back, and get another dozen. This series was one of the ones he 'rented'.

I expect the social stuff to be dated--very few authors can manage to extrapolate social trends, or write things that don't dessicate and curl up at the corners. amd Blish wasn't one of the few.

What I'd like to find if I reread the t...more

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Jan 15, 2009 Anthony added it · review of another edition

Disappointing. Mr. Blish chose cities as his medium of exploring space but totally neglected to incorporate city information or life into his stories. To read Cities in Flight is to read about Mayor Amalfi, the City Fathers, and a few people around him. Otherwise there were only a couple of cops and that about represented the whole of Manhattan. I mean, if you want to stage a vast city as your base at least have a cast of one hundred drawn from various areas of Manhattan. For such a famous place...more

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Oct 08, 2012 Aidan Nancarrow rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantastika

Science Fiction is a literature of hopes, dreams, aspirations, and speculations. These things, though they are sometimes simple, can be surprisingly difficult to communicate. Matching the right words to the correct idea is no small task, and often authors are inexact in the stories they tell. Not surprisingly and for a great many reasons, many writers of science fiction and fantasy fail to achieve a quality telling of the story they wanted to tell. When considering SF it becomes necessary to ju...more Science Fiction is a literature of hopes, dreams, aspirations, and speculations. These things, though they are sometimes simple, can be surprisingly difficult to communicate. Matching the right words to the correct idea is no small task, and often authors are inexact in the stories they tell. Not surprisingly and for a great many reasons, many writers of science fiction and fantasy fail to achieve a quality telling of the story they wanted to tell. When considering SF it becomes necessary to judge not just if a story fails but how spectacularly it fails and if something salvageable can be pulled from the wreckage.

I will label Cities in Flight as one of the notable failures of SF's Golden Age. The author, James Blish, was one of the lesser lights of the era. He had the respect and friendship of many of the genre's leading figures, including Arthur C. Clarke and Damon Knight. He definitely aspired to be one of the more high-minded of Science Fiction's writers and at his height he was one of the era's better writers, much better than Isaac Asimov, not nearly as good as Alfred Bester or Robert Heinlein. But where Asimov could tie his stories around a few consistent ideas, steadily adding layers of complexity to a few solid core concepts, Blish stumbled, writing too much about too little and quickly growing dull and uninteresting. Where we can read A.E. Van Vogt and, despite his poor writing, delight in the exhuberance of his imagination, we cannot find creative celebration in James Blish. He was too serious to get lost in his own worlds, too smart to write in a fit of creative energy, yet lacking a real muse and unable to write something truly inspired.

Cities in Flight bills itself as a story, epic in scope, spanning the life cycle of an entire galactic civilization. Sadly, this is some seriously false advertising. What it is is a cycle of four novels, published in the 1950s and early 1960s, set in the same universe. The premise of the stories is that, in the midst of the cultural collapse of Western Civilization, a group of scientists and researchers discover the principles of anti-gravity technology (which also doubles as a faster-than-light propulsion system, go figure) and an anti-aging drug. Using these two discoveries, humanity settles a new galactic civilization. The title of the book derives from the fact that, utilizing anti-gravity, entire cities are able to lift off of Earth and fly between planets, essentially becoming small armies of hired labor.

The order in which the books were written are out of sync with their chronological order and, since Blish heavily revised his original material as he went on, the quality of his work differs greatly. Books 2 (A Life for the Stars), 3 (Earthman, Come Home) and 4 (The Triumph of Time) follow the exploits of New York-in-Flight, while Book 1 (They Shall Have Stars) profiles the discovery of anti-gravity and anti-agathic drugs hundreds of years earlier. Earthman, Come Home is the best of the bunch and it is also the oldest. Essentially, it follows the adventures of New York wandering the galaxy, finding work where it can and struggling to make a few bucks. Quite obviously, it finds its inspiration in America during the Great Depression and a great deal of the book's lexicon is drawn from period slang (Okie, tramp, bindlestiff, 'jungles'). Left alone, it would be one of the finer pieces of early Space Opera, but Blish felt the need to ruin it by over intellectualizing something that could not bear the load of extended thought. They Shall Have Stars is a lengthy polemic about the collapse of Western Civilization. Allegedly, Blish was inspired by the German racialist philosopher Oswald Spengler's cyclical theory of history and there are some quite profound and thoughtful passages spread throughout the book. Unfortunately, as a novel, it is about as interesting to read as watching mold grow. The Triumph of Time details the apocalypse. Again, there is some writing of real merit but it is totally buried beneath comically pretentious pseudo-techno babble, melodramatic conflict, and stupid romances. A Life for the Stars is actually a rather fine novel. It, however, adds nothing to the collection other than some minor world-building flourishes. It is as if Blish, having written a beginning, middle and end, added a second middle to his story out of sheer boredom (or, more likely, a need to sell a story) and expected the reader not to notice.

We can credit James Blish with attempting to write some of the most intelligent Science Fiction of the time. We have to regret that he fell so very far from his mark. He had some very real talent as a writer, some very grand ideas, and a genuine desire to explore the problems of history, culture and human nature. Unfortunately, he thought lengthy expositions about mathematical formulas and fictional drugs made for good literature and frequent name-dropping excused real historical learning. In Blish there is just enough nourishment to keep us reading till the end only to leave us feeling disappointed and craving something more. Cities in Flight is a failure but merely of the ordinary kind. There is nothing spectacular here. (less)

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Jul 17, 2012 Salimbol rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, masterworks-sf-fantasy

Great concept (Cities. In. Space!), flawed execution. It has a genuinely epic scope, and it was quite fascinating to see which aspects of his vast future history the author chose to explore. Thumbs up also for including economics in this, and for intelligently considering some of the implications of humankind essentially conquering aging. Nevertheless, this is *extremely* didactic old-school science fiction, in which people stand around earnestly explaining political philosophy and scientific th...more

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Feb 26, 2011 Bill Wellham rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

James Blish’s Cities in Flight has been whispering ‘read me, read me’ for many a year. I remember being amazed by the cover of the book when I was a kid. After all this time, I have finally read it.

I was expecting great things from a book in the renowned SF Masterworks series. Most of these I have read have been great. Unfortunately, I was disappointed, and struggled to read more than ten laborious pages at a time. There are six hundred in all.

I don’t want to trawl out the plot here, only as muc...more James Blish’s Cities in Flight has been whispering ‘read me, read me’ for many a year. I remember being amazed by the cover of the book when I was a kid. After all this time, I have finally read it.

I was expecting great things from a book in the renowned SF Masterworks series. Most of these I have read have been great. Unfortunately, I was disappointed, and struggled to read more than ten laborious pages at a time. There are six hundred in all.

I don’t want to trawl out the plot here, only as much as to summarize:
In the future, mankind will escape the tyranny and poverty of an Eastern controlled Earth, by colonizing the galaxy. Instead of using the usual method of building space craft, mankind has chosen the far simpler method of floating all the great cities of the world into space using anti gravity engines. Instead of developing faster than light travel to shorten the vast interstellar distances, he will develop life extending drugs, so that the he can survive the hundreds of years of flight.

These are the two scientific ideas which form the spine of the science behind the plot. Unfortunately, I think they are both ridiculous from the off! During the vast bulk of the book, we follow the city of New York, as it travels from one adventure to the next. Even though this is supposed to be set hundreds of years in the future, the images of a 1950s New York prevail; with Chrysler building, streets and blocks, full of characters which have walked straight out of a fifties b-movie. James Blish has not really thought very far forward in his imagination of society; hundreds of years may pass, but people talk and act the same, and the city looks the same. This place is run on oil and coal. A future of nuts and bolts engineering.

There will be thousands of these floating cities, roaming around space. What will be the main occupation and reason for these cities to travel?? Doing odd jobs. Like travelling repairmen moving from planet to planet, working for a living. This was essentially because they were poor ‘oakies’ on the run. The whole book is ‘The great Depression’ of the 1930s, but ‘set in space’. Again, I just find this ridiculous.

Anyway… this goes on and on… and on. Eventually it ends, which is a relief.

Sorry, but I have read many books written before this, with far more thought provoking ideas.
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Simon Broadly speaking you are probably right although I enjoyed some parts of this series more than others. The second part for instance, about one man's r...more
Jul 13, 2010 03:08am

Bill Wellham I totally agree about the parts. I did enjoy the book to begin with.
With the first part... I actually found the idea of building a giagntic frozen br...more
Jul 13, 2010 03:24am

Bill Wellham I forgot to mention the city fathers! A nice idea of machine sized AIs. I could imagine this quite well. Almost victorian in their mechanics. A nice a...more
Jul 13, 2010 03:31am

Jun 24, 2011 Tim rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Blish had some fascinating ideas. Though a lot of the scientific concepts seem very outdated now, it is interesting to track the possibilities embodied in the basic concepts of longevity drugs, and "spindizzies" to move entire cities and planets around the universe at hyper-speeds.

But a lot of the action falls flat, as the reader is expected to believe that the main characters have anticipated the actions of other people and cultures to an impossible degree. The assumption that the main characte...more

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Jul 11, 2009 James rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

"A compelling future history, a tale of thistledown cities blown by the winds of time. This is one of SF's most original concepts, an exciting tale deepened and made utterly plausible by Blish's craft and his mature understanding of people and history. If you haven't read this yet, I envy you. Blish's cities will fly through your dreams." - Stephen Baxter

This is a galaxy-spanning masterwork, originally published in four volumes. In it James Blish explores a future in which two crucial discoverie...more

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Aug 17, 2008 Robert rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: scifi

This is a review of the first two books of the quartet. The first is in a style I have come to expect from Blish; a rather high brow and deep philosophical discussion masquerading as an eventful piece of pulp. Dubious science fiction is carried off by a presentation indebted to a knowledge and understanding of real science, unlike many modern approaches where any attempt to explain the nature of advanced technology is not forthcoming. The book does take oblique looks at two common Blish themes:...more This is a review of the first two books of the quartet. The first is in a style I have come to expect from Blish; a rather high brow and deep philosophical discussion masquerading as an eventful piece of pulp. Dubious science fiction is carried off by a presentation indebted to a knowledge and understanding of real science, unlike many modern approaches where any attempt to explain the nature of advanced technology is not forthcoming. The book does take oblique looks at two common Blish themes: religion and the search for knowledge, which are closely interwoven in Black Easter, A Case of Conscience and Doctor Mirabilis. One point he argues for is that giant government funded research projects will eventually fail to produce anything of significance simply because they will become divorced from the normal open scientific discussion. He argues that only the military would be able to afford the projects and they would apply strict security measures so that no knowledge would be transmitted outside the government. No brilliant researchers will work within one, as the security risk is too high. The rest of the scientific community will apply no deep skepticism, as it has no access. In fact such projects will cease to be science at all. Blish suggests that the best ideas will exist in the heads of marginal scientists with theories that diverge wildly from the consensus view. This does not appear to have been born out in the years between 1957 and 2000.
Another idea put across is that the West will in effect cease to differ from the East as the drive toward secrecy and security takes away the populace’s privacy and freedom of action and determination. I’ve seen too much evidence of this in both Britain and the USA, where most people, though not as repressed as in the ex-Soviet population were, have no conception of how repressed they actually are by the tyranny of video cameras, phone taps, driving licenses, the police and government.
A minor idea in the book is that mass religion will become more popular, more stridently evangelistic, more fanatical and utterly meaningless. This is being proved true every day across the globe. (The quote about fanaticism being generated not by conviction but by insecurity is a perceptive truth.)
The second novel in the volume is inferior but still proved worthwhile. It extrapolates the technological and geo-political situation presented in the first novel forward another thousand years or so. History has proved that geo-political speculation wrong and the philosophical debates of the earlier work are lacking, however one further point about the pursuit of knowledge is made. A technology exists for stuffing facts directly into memory but teachers are still required in order to promote understanding of the facts and reasoning about them. It seems unlikely that human teachers are going to be uniformly redundant in the near or far future. Blish also suggests that studies of history are of great use to politicians, military strategists and managers. He’s probably right.
All of this is secondary to the not unique idea of a kid of the far future with no evident talent becoming a significant and successful figure in the course of an eventful and exciting narrative. It seems that the idea has existed for a very long time but the idea used to be flung into the far (mythic) past. The story of King Arthur being identified by the Sword in the Stone would be one of the finest and most famous examples. That was set in a mythic past even when the earliest version was written. Perhaps science fiction sometimes takes on the role of modern myth making more profoundly than modern popular fantasy does.
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Oct 21, 2007 Nicholas Whyte added it · review of another edition

http://nhw.livejournal.com/370816.html[return][return]The full series in a single volume, containing They Shall Have Stars, A Life For The Stars, Earthman, Come Home and The Triumph of Time (aka A Clash of Cymbals).[return][return]The first book, They Shall Have Stars, is set off from the other three by being set in the near future, on a recognisable Cold War earth; I was slightly amused to note mention of Eritrea and Latvia as independent states, which must have seemed rather less likely than t...more http://nhw.livejournal.com/370816.html[return][return]The full series in a single volume, containing They Shall Have Stars, A Life For The Stars, Earthman, Come Home and The Triumph of Time (aka A Clash of Cymbals).[return][return]The first book, They Shall Have Stars, is set off from the other three by being set in the near future, on a recognisable Cold War earth; I was slightly amused to note mention of Eritrea and Latvia as independent states, which must have seemed rather less likely than the end of the Cold War back when it was first written in 1957. (Heck, here I am in the capital city of a country that nobody had heard of a hundred years ago.) Story not especially engaging, a reflection really on contemporary US politics, McCarthyism, the space program, J. Edgar Hoover, the likelihood that the West would lose to Communism. The central character, Senator Wagoner, starts a trend for the rest of the series by working out a complex plan manipulating his political enemies into allowing his ideas to triumph.[return][return]I think I first read A Life For The Stars perhaps even before I left primary school - I seem to remember having to look up the word "concubine" in my dictionary. It was the last to be written, certainly the best of the four I think. A Bildungsroman of young Chris deFord, who accidentally leaves earth with the flying city of Scranton Pennsylvania; using the techniques sponsored by Wagoner ni the first novel, cities have been flying around the universe for ages by now. Chris ends up on New York and saves the day. Generally good stuff, although Chris' only close friend (the one with the concubines) gets treated pretty badly by the author.[return][return]Earthman, Come Home is supposed to be the real classic of the series, with one of its component novellas winning a retro-Hugo last year. I didn't completely understand why (well, I suppose the fact that the other stories in the running for the retro-Hugo were much more obscure may help explain why). Mayor Amalfi of New York (Blish having disposed of Chris deFord in a casual half-sentence) feels a bit like Doctor Who but in a city-sized TARDIS, advised by the computers known as the City Fathers, zooming from one episodic scrape to another, in the penultimate episode saving humanity at the cost of eternal exile. I didn't think it really hung together all that well, and by this stage Amalfi's habit of working out a complex plan manipulating his political enemies into allowing him to triumph was beginning to annoy me.[return][return]The series ends with a bit of a whimper. The Triumph of Time has lots of grand ideas, stabs at character development both of the established characters from earlier volumes and of a romantic young couple, and the end of the world as we know it; but doesn't really deliver on any of them. A bit disappointing. There's a rather pointless essay postscript about Blish and the historical theories of Spengler, by one Richard D. Mullen; perhaps I was just tired by then but I didn't feel it had added much to my understanding of the book.[return][return]However the audacity of Blish's vision and his ability to make you suspend your disbelief in flying cities do help the series as a whole succeed. And apart from the end the plotting is generally solid. Good old-fashioned stuff.(less)

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Jan 30, 2011 Deborah Ideiosepius rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

I read this book as at about sixteen and it totally inspired me. I re-read it ever year or so for a while until I no longer owned the book. About a week ago I found it in Pulp Fiction book shop in Brisbane, it had been re-printed in the “Masterworks of Sci-fi” series. It is still as inspiring as it ever was thirty odd years ago, a good strong series of science fiction of the old genera in that they have a lot of science in them.

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Jul 20, 2011 Angela rated it 2 of 5 stars

Good ol' boy sci-fi, where the rich vastness of the universe is nonetheless incapable of dislodging the narrative from narrow-minded white American male-ness.

In this, Protagonist is a stowaway on a massive (Miyazaki-esque) flying city contraption; almost a proto-steampunk visual. Too bad the city feels about as diverse as Pittsburgh. (I say this with much love and respect for Pittsburgh.)

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Nov 30, 2010 Mmyoung rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

The writing quality of the four books that make up this collection varies but what does is the sense of wonder and excitement that underlies the entire series. For this reader the latter two books (Earthman, Come Home and The Triumph of Time) were, with Clarke's Tales of the White Hart Inn, crucial in the development of an early and ongoing love of the entire field of science fiction.

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Jan 09, 2009 Beth rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I think that this is the best sci-fi book I have read. Loved the layers of history imbedded in the story and the fact that it was written during the cold war. Also loved that the that the author could imagine all sorts of amazing things that would be possible in the future, but could not come up with a substitute for an audio cassette tape:)

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Sep 06, 2010 Benjamin Thomas rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Like many people, I first read this collection of four novels when I was in High School. Long out-of-print I was very happy to see them repackaged for a whole new generation. This is high-quality science fiction from the golden age. I was suprised that so little of the technology is out-of-date (vacuum tubes excepted) that it reads as fresh now as it did before.

But this is more than just the superficial sci-fi that we sometimes hear about. Much more than spaceships and aliens, these novels dig d...more

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Jun 24, 2010 Lord Humungus rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The version I have is Cities In Flight: Volume 1, I think the first 2 stories in a quartet. Got it solely based on the cover (an older printing). Although conceptually a cool idea, the story telling was dry and boring. Maybe his Star Trek stuff was better, but this book was enough to deter me from reading any more of his work.

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Apr 16, 2012 Farnham rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: archive

One of the SF epics that I read 40 years ago, that had a great deal to do with my pseudo-political growth. Wildly fantastic approach to eco-governance, mixing the Magic Bus romantic and the Rand pragmatist into tales of possible evolution, to the sound track of Tales of Brave Ulysses. An Amazing Journey...

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Aug 08, 2009 Charles rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

This is actually 4 complete novels. Fairly short ones. And I originally read a couple of them unders separate covers. A collossal achievement really. In the future whole cities take flight through the galaxy and its very interesting to see Blish expand on this concept. Good works. Perhaps Blish's best.

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Mar 01, 2013 Mrdavidpeat rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: ebook, novels

It had some nice images, such as the titular Raumstadt. The fact that they were cities however seemed to be incidental. Perhaps I have been spoiled by Pratchett, Miéville, etc. as I wanted the cities to have some character.

Characters of any sort were mostly lacking. The protagonist through the latter half of the book was infuriating.

One of the least enjoyable (and overlong!) SF Masterworks I've read.

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Aug 14, 2012 Sean Randall rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I think I should've read these as separate books. For some reason I sort of lost the thread, and, though I got a lot of Heinleinism out of Blish's style of writing, wasn't overly impressed. I got the same sort of "I expected more" that I had when finishing Asimov's Foundation.

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Aug 27, 2012 Judity rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

I recently hunted through all my science fiction paperback books to find this to reread it one more time. Can you imagine where you live suddenly flying off into space? What an exciting concept, and this author writes about it so well.

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Mar 14, 2012 Mendhak rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

The best way to approach this book is to think of it as the Foundation series. It's a series of short stories related to each other and spanning millennia. It's also full of extremely intelligent characters who are able to grasp in an instant long term implications and meanings of thoughts and actions.

It's surprisingly well written in terms of scifi-science and the cultures, economies and history that those circumstances would lead us to.

The first story which takes place around this time in his...more

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About James Blish

James Benjamin Blish (East Orange, New Jersey, May 23, 1921 – Henley-on-Thames, July 30, 1975) was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. Blish also wrote literary criticism of science fiction using the pen-name William Atheling Jr.

In the late 1930's to the early 1940's, Blish was a member of the Futurians.

Blish trained as a biologist at Rutgers and Columbia University, and spent 1942–...more

More about James Blish...

Books by James Blish

A Case of Conscience (After Such Knowledge, #4)

They Shall Have Stars (Cities in Flight, #1)

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“[T]he end cannot justify the means; but if there are no other means, and the end is necessary...” — 4 people liked it

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