James Blish's Cities In Flight...

[Christopher]

Okay, I've started Earthman, Come Home, and it does satisfy my questions and concerns in the previous post. It explains that it's actually Manhattan Island, the whole thing and none of the other boroughs, that's travelling in space, meaning its spindizzy field must be pretty elongated. It also gives a much better feel for the city as a city, with more mention of Manhattan geography.

 

[Warped9]

^^ I like your current avatar. The way the 11 footer is lit it evokes how the ship could have looked in orbital drydock.

 

[Christopher]

Still working through Earthman, Come Home, and in the "He" section there's some rather horrific sexism, or at least horrific callousness, that's rather put me off.

Spoiler: Earthman, Come Home: "He" chapters

The characters of Okie New York become aware of a danger from a "bindlestiff," a pirate city that preys on other cities. The city manager concocts a plan -- or rather, pulls out a plan he's had ready for a long time -- to find a planet and obtain its local women as bait/bribes for the pirate city. The planet they find, appropriately named He, has a profoundly misogynistic culture that treats women as evil animals, keeping them naked and in cages. The first thing the Hevians do is to give away a bunch of their women -- seemingly hundreds -- to the New Yorkers. None of the protagonists seems to have any great problem with the Hevians' attitude toward women. There's a scene where the mayor watches a bunch of these naked Hevian women being hosed clean by the book's sole female protagonist -- who herself has a habit of inappropriate, casual nudism, as it happens.

When New York needs to get away from the pirate city, they take these hundreds of local animal-women and leave them where the pirates can easily abduct them, as a distraction while the city gets away. There's no discussion or speculation of what kind of violation or abuse or slavery may befall these women once they're taken, and the protagonists don't seem to care in the slightest. But it's a moot point, since literally minutes after the women are taken aboard the pirate city, it's destroyed as a consequence of the New Yorkers' escape plan. All those helpless women are killed, it's the protagonists' fault, and nobody cares in the slightest, not even the token female lead. Throughout, they're treated merely as disposable commodities rather than people.

And that's only the most blatant example of the amorality of these characters. I can get that they're basically galactic hoboes and have to do what they must to survive, but they'd be more sympathetic characters if they had some ethical qualms and weren't quite so ruthless in their scheming. And the sheer casual misogyny of the events described in the spoiler box is just staggering.

 

[Christopher]

I finished Cities in Flight this morning. I wasn't crazy about The Triumph of Time, the final volume. It felt like an afterthought. The saga of spindizzy New York and Mayor Amalfi pretty much ended with the conclusion of Earthman, Come Home, and having the characters suddenly have to tackle the end of the entire universe, and be the only ones in the universe in a position to do anything about it, however tenuously, was out of left field and kind of an implausible aggrandizement of the characters. The whole thing seemed rather unfocused, really, and I wasn't crazy about where some of the characters' journeys took them.

Also, the physics was rather ludicrous. It's disturbing to realize that this nonsense represented (or at least approximated) the best scientific models of the universe that existed as recently as half a century ago. Well, I mean, as a person I'm excited to see what great progress we've made in understanding our universe in such a brief span of time, but as an SF writer it makes me wonder: will my best efforts at plausible science fiction be this dated and ridiculous fifty years from now?

Overall, throughout the series, Blish never really put any effort into depicting aliens. A few alien species, mainly the Vegans, were discussed here and there and occasionally emerged as actors in the story, but they were always unseen, off-camera, and never developed in any degree. So the attempt to establish a new alien menace, the Web of Hercules, in The Triumph of Time is superficial and unsatisfying. The Web is presented as a rival to the main characters in their pursuit of their (literally) ultimate goal, but when they actually arrive and begin their attack, they're defeated with -- and I say this with no exaggeration whatever -- the press of a single button. The main danger in the novel, and they're an afterthought disposed of as casually as you could imagine. The only other real action in the novel comes from a clash with a band of religious fanatics who briefly conquer the planet, and while their defeat takes rather more time, it still comes far too easily.

All told, I can't say I enjoyed Cities in Flight too much. The first book (in story order, but the second one written) was pretty good, but it was just a prologue to the saga that gives the series its name, and I had my problems with all three volumes in that saga. And its ending was particularly weak, all the more so in contrast to the cosmic scale it strives for.

 

[stj]

The He section of Earthman Come Home is, I'm sure, an engagement with space opera in the Doc Smith Lensman variety (if not Smith himself.) Really, some of this seems to be about critiquing some aspects. The originals are vastly more ruthless, but jovial about it, than this story. IT's been some years, but I would not be quick to rule out irony. Still, if the He story gets on the nerves, it does.

Cities in Flight is much, much bleaker in its acceptance of flawed people than most stories or TV, even (or especially?) those who like to posture about their moral ambiguity. The offhand discovery that the juvenile hero of the second novel is shot, for a failure instead of a crime, really should have tipped off the reader.

There is more to Earthman Come Home than amoral scoundrels kicking ass, or even genuine dark and gritty done with real shades of gray. There is a pattern of encounters with old political ideologies, ranging from feudalism to "Hamiltonianism." These stories have an extra interest for those who think about society, politics, economics, history and other such phenomena. Nor do they lack a moral point of view.

Lastly, The Triumph of Time quickly disposes of the enemies because it is not about who wins. I'm not sure it should have been a novel, because the enemies to my mind are dull padding. The problem with the novel therefore is not the easy way the enemies are defeated but the time wasted on them in the first place.

 

[Christopher]

There is more to Earthman Come Home than amoral scoundrels kicking ass, or even genuine dark and gritty done with real shades of gray. There is a pattern of encounters with old political ideologies, ranging from feudalism to "Hamiltonianism." These stories have an extra interest for those who think about society, politics, economics, history and other such phenomena. Nor do they lack a moral point of view.

Yeah, they had their points of interest, and they certainly had their share of ideas. And not just philosophical ideas. One thing I have to give Blish credit for is his futurism. He even seems to have predicted nanotechnology, because he writes about drugs and materials engineered on a molecular level. And the telepresence system used on the Bridge in They Shall Have Stars presages virtual reality. (Yet on the other hand, the super-advanced technology of two millennia hence is still based on vacuum tubes.)

Lastly, The Triumph of Time quickly disposes of the enemies because it is not about who wins. I'm not sure it should have been a novel, because the enemies to my mind are dull padding. The problem with the novel therefore is not the easy way the enemies are defeated but the time wasted on them in the first place.

Sure, that's not inconsistent with what I was saying. The treatment of the aliens and their conflict with the protagonists was so cursory that it would've been improved as much by leaving them out altogether as it would've by actually putting some effort into their portrayal. Either way, it was an ineffectual subplot.