James Blish's Cities In Flight...

[Christopher]

^Apparently, yes. I've only skimmed it so far.

And yes, Blish dropped a lot of CoF Easter eggs into his Trek adaptations, I gather. I recall a mention of the Vegan Tyranny, and in skimming through CoF, it looks like that's the origin of that.

 

[stj]

Yes, Bridge was a novella that became part of They Shall Have Stars.

And Blish's adaptation of City on the Edge of Forever compares Edith Keeler's philosophy to "Bonner the Stochastic," from The Triumph of Time (aka Clash of Cymbals.)

Cities in Flight is modeled on Oswald Spengler's philosophy of history. I doubt that Blish actually believed in the philosophy, but adds another layer of interest to the series.
I'm quite sure he didn't believe in the fascist system of A Torrent of Faces.

Blish was fascinating. Spock Must Die! reveals Uhura to be fluent in James Joyce's "Eurish," the language Finnegan's Wake is written in. (And interpretation of Joyce provides a symbolic resolution at the climax of Case of Conscience.)

Titan's Daughter was more or less written to rationalize gaudy sf pulp magazine covers but still managed to be a fun story. VOR tackled the advent of a Day the Earth Stood Still robot in about as serious and sober a way it could be done.
He even rationalized the presence of teens on space missions in his juveniles, The Space Angels and Mission to the Heart Stars!

Despite the witty play of ideas, Blish was a very emotional writer, for those willing to look past the wit. Who else but a passionate man would make the Port Authority of New York the villains of The Seedling Stars because he hated Robert Moses? (Long before Robert Caro's biography.)

Doctor Mirabilis was probably his best novel. It truly is extraordinary.

 

[Dusty Ayres]

No way in hell do I think that it could be done well now in the NuTrek style. I also remember thinking it could have been a great followup to TMP and something I would have preferred to TWOK.

Bullshit, I say that the novel would work with 'NuTrek' as you call it, since Kirk & Co. are back in the public eye. I think that you need to come off of your high horse of hatred of J.J. Abrams and see if he could do it or not.

 

[Warped9]

No way in hell do I think that it could be done well now in the NuTrek style. I also remember thinking it could have been a great followup to TMP and something I would have preferred to TWOK.

Bullshit, I say that the novel would work with 'NuTrek' as you call it, since Kirk & Co. are back in the public eye. I think that you need to come off of your high horse of hatred of J.J. Abrams and see if he could do it or not.

I don't apologize for anything and I stand by my opinion.

And this thread isn't about launching a discussion about what I consider to be a garbage film. Like it all you want, but don't presume to try impugning my opinion just because I don't follow the crowd and agree with you.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I think that you need to come off of your high horse of hatred of J.J. Abrams and see if he could do it or not.

Wish for Israeli/Palestinian peace while you're at it.

 

[Christopher]

All Trek XI discussion in the appropriate forum, please. We're here to talk about flying cities.

 

[Warped9]

All Trek XI discussion in the appropriate forum, please. We're here to talk about flying cities.

Thank you.

 

[Ubik]

Well, I thought Cities in Flight was good, occasionally great, but too inconsistent. They're fun, certainly, but a bit awkward when put together, in a way that, say, the Foundation trilogy is not awkward when put together. I think Blish is a very good second-tier Golden Age writer. He's got the plotting and the crisp prose of the best Golden Age writers, but he's also got a tendency to silliness and flat characters that Asimov and Heinlein managed to avoid for the most part (at that time, anyway.) His ideas are very big, but unlike, say, Clarke, his prose doesn't usually rise to the challenge.

I think Case of Conscience and the novella Surface Tension are both better. But I suspect you'll enjoy Cities in Flight just fine. They are absolutely worth reading, anyway.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

That's a reasonable assessment of Blish. He was pretty well-read scientifically and made a determined effort to keep science speculation central to his sf stories. He sometimes tosses in a science notion as a justification for a plot development or character behavior so offhandedly or discursively that it begs plausibility.

I'm not so sure about "second tier," though - while he's not nearly as popular a writer as some better-known people he may have been about as influential on sf in America as some of them.

 

[Christopher]

Well, I just finished They Shall Have Stars (I'm reading them in chronological story order rather than publication order because it's easier that way), and I enjoyed it. I admit, Blish's Trek adaptations never really motivated me to seek out his other work, since they struck me as kind of bland and cursory, but TSHS is good, lively stuff. There's some very nice writing in it, witty and creative uses of language. As for the story, it is very much a product of its time, and interesting as a historical artifact. Blish assumed not only that the Cold War would continue unabated for another 60 years, but that oppressive forces in the '50s US government like McCarthyism and J. Edgar Hoover's thought-police version of the FBI would also continue to grow stronger, to the point that America would become effectively indistinguishable from the USSR. Rather pessimistic in retrospect, but that's the nature of cautionary-tale SF, showing what will happen if a current trend continues to its logical endpoint.

And it seems rather daring to tell a tale like this during the McCarthy era, to propose that the West is doomed. I doubt Blish could've sold this story just a few years earlier. But I guess by '56 or '57, McCarthy had been challenged and questioned enough that his ilk no longer had quite as much power. And besides, who back then would've paid any attention to a science fiction novel?

All in all, an entertaining tale, but highly dated and interesting mainly from a historical perspective. And the disappointing thing is that it didn't involve any actual flying cities. It's basically just a prologue for what's to come.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

And it seems rather daring to tell a tale like this during the McCarthy era, to propose that the West is doomed. I doubt Blish could've sold this story just a few years earlier. But I guess by '56 or '57, McCarthy had been challenged and questioned enough that his ilk no longer had quite as much power. And besides, who back then would've paid any attention to a science fiction novel?

Yep, contrary to "Far Beyond The Stars" no one of influence would have noticed or cared what was being published in sf pulps in the 1960s. 1930s-era communists and socialists were amply represented in the New York sf community that spawned the editors and many of the regular contributors of the 1940s and 1950s. Blish's own politics were more eccentric; he reportedly thought fascism was "interesting in theory."

 

[Christopher]

Yep, contrary to "Far Beyond The Stars" no one of influence would have noticed or cared what was being published in sf pulps in the 1960s.

Well, to be fair, in "Far Beyond the Stars" (which I believe was set in 1957, around the same time They Shall Have Stars was published), the "person of influence" who quashed Benny's stories was the magazine's own publisher. So it wasn't like there was some big public controversy or government involvement; it was just that the publisher himself was racist and refused to publish stories with a black hero. I don't find that implausible at all. After all, we know that John W. Campbell's ethnocentrism placed some limits on the stories that got published in Astounding, at least to the extent that Asimov chose to write in a humans-only universe to avoid having to deal with Campbell's biases.

1930s-era communists and socialists were amply represented in the New York sf community that spawned the editors and many of the regular contributors of the 1940s and 1950s. Blish's own politics were more eccentric; he reportedly thought fascism was "interesting in theory."

Sounds more like something I would've expected Heinlein to say.

 

[Silvercrest]

I wonder what went through Blish's mind when he did the adaptation of "Patterns of Force", then.

 

[stj]

Blish wrote a couple of YA novels that rationalized the presence of teens as cadets. His future society enrolled young people directly into apprenticeships for highly responsible positions. And they enforced a sexual code handily appropriate for Juvenile fiction in the late Fifties/early Sixties on the grounds that coed was distracting to a really sound education. I read a foreword by his daughter where she told of asking him if he really believed the rationale. As I recall he was too nonplussed at being taken so literally he couldn't quite answer, or possibly felt caught out at writing something he didn't believe.

In other words, Blish was the kind of man for whom "interesting" doesn't mean approving. He actually wrote a Fascist novel, by his eccentric lights, called A Torrent of Faces, in collaboration with Norman L. Knight. Their version of Fascism had zero in common with fascism as commonly understood. It took seriously, for fictional purposes, some of the blather about noncapitalist forms of economic organization. It was actually a fictional form of benevolent despotism, and I doubt he took it much more seriously than he took his cadets. (It was an overpopulation tract and a fictional government that couldn't be blamed for permitting profiteering as desirable, to foreclose the objection that there is potentially material abundance.)

That said, Blish had a flirtation with the Communist Party in his youth, and like so many, veered sharply rightward with McCarthyism. Another collaboration, The Duplicated Man, featured a fictional Communist Party whose apparatus was modeled on the organelles of the cell! As I mentioned before, his political vision was passionate enough to promote Robert Moses to bete noir. Blish was no longer interested in ordinary people in the mass. But, then, this is true of practically every word in print, or minute on film or stage.

The changes and interstitial comments Blish made in the adapatation of Patterns of Force don't stick with me clearly enough to be sure, but I have a vague feeling he was a little dubious of the idea. The idea that Nazis were efficient, when it was Prussians who were efficient (a reputation earned after the post-Napoleonic reforms in education and government,) was harebrained and reactionary even then.

 

[Christopher]

That said, Blish had a flirtation with the Communist Party in his youth, and like so many, veered sharply rightward with McCarthyism.

He can't have veered that sharply, since in They Shall Have Stars he rather harshly condemns McCarthyism through the surrogate character McHinery. Although he's hardly sympathetic to the Communists in that book; it presents an essential "victory" for the Soviets, but definitely portrays it as a bad thing.

 

[Mysterion]

He can't have veered that sharply, since in They Shall Have Stars he rather harshly condemns McCarthyism through the surrogate character McHinery. Although he's hardly sympathetic to the Communists in that book; it presents an essential "victory" for the Soviets, but definitely portrays it as a bad thing.

Here's a question: do a writer's fictional creations always reflect the beliefs of that writer? While I'm not necessarily disputing what you wrote above, isn't there the possibility that what Blish wrote might have been an intellectual exercise on his part rather than a fictionalized declaration of his personal beliefs?

 

[Christopher]

Here's a question: do a writer's fictional creations always reflect the beliefs of that writer?

Not always, of course, but this particular novel certainly came off as a critique of the way things were going in America at the time it was written. It had the familiar flavor of a cautionary tale.

And it is absolutely not the kind of book that a pro-McCarthyist would've written, because a person with that kind of mentality would put ideology above all else and been completely unwilling to consider the validity of an alternative political perspective, let alone write from it.

 

[Mysterion]

^^^^
Fair 'nuff.

 

[stj]

They Shall Have Stars criticizes "McCarthyism" as an aberration in strategy, tactics and the supposed true ideals of democracy in the Manichean struggle against a demonic enemy, whose triumph would be pretty much hell on Earth. As an indictment of "McCarthyism," it forgets one crucial thing: The whole notion of a Soviet enemy who really was planning conquest of Christendom, aka Western Civilization, was one of the most important lies McCarthy was trying to sell.

Seeing the people who defeated Hitler as the greatest evil the world has ever known, while the western democracies who collaborated in the slaughter of the Spanish republic and the conquest of Ethiopia were the last vestige of the free human spirit, well, it would be kindest not to speculate on what went wrong with Blish.

For whatever reason, he bought right into the most important claim made in justification of the anti-Communist crusade. Repeated covert assaults on democratic governments all around the world, huge invasions leading to years and years of war will millions and millions of casualties at a cost of trillions of dollars. And all of it, all of it, for nothing, pissed into the wind against an imaginary threat, puffed up by the likes of McCarthy. Blish's distaste for some of the inevitable domestic blowback of the murderous crusade is more like someone who eats meat sneering at a butcher for having a crude and tasteless job.

 

[Christopher]

I finished the second volume chronologically (last written), A Life for the Stars, last night. I wasn't too impressed. I think it was a "juvenile," since it centers on an underage protagonist who starts out with nothing but stumbles his way into progressively better situations and higher status until he's... well, let's just say that people who criticize 2009's Star Trek for promoting Kirk too fast would hate this one. And there isn't even any real action. The protagonist gets peripherally involved in dangerous situations, other characters go off and do the big, important stuff, and then they come back and tell him how they followed his advice and saved the day.

Also, for a book about cities flying through space, it didn't do a very good job of depicting the rather wild and intriguing concept of New York City flying through space. There's barely any reference to New York's geography, aside from mentioning at the end that the mayor's control center is atop the Empire State Building. It doesn't feel like New York. It just feels like a generic sci-fi setting. I'm hoping that's because this was the last work Blish wrote in this continuity. The next volume in the collection, Earthman Come Home, is itself a collection of several earlier Okie stories set in New York, and hopefully that's where he puts the bulk of the description of the city itself. I would really like these stories to give me a good sense of a familiar city transposed into an exotic environment, and I'm not getting that yet.

(While we're on the subject, it's a shame there's never been a movie of this. It'd be great to do one that was actually filmed in NYC. Of course, this is supposed to be many centuries in the future, but that could be retconned; the movie could be set in the nearer term so that the architecture wouldn't have to have changed all that much.)

I'm particularly wondering about the geography of spindizzy New York. How much of the city was actually taken into space? Is it the entirety of Manhattan Island? The spindizzy field seems to be described as roughly spherical, and Manhattan is way too elongated. So is it just Midtown? Or did they somehow take parts of the Bronx, Queens, and New Jersey along as well, and maybe the water in the rivers? What's the geology like under NYC? Is the ground stable enough to hold together if bits of several islands and the continental land mass were lifted up into space? Maybe Earthman will address these points too.