The Golden Age of Science Fiction is When You're Twelve
SF Masterworks #3: Cities in Flight, by James Blish
Spoiler Warning: This review gives away the plot of the book. Completely.
From the embankment of the long-abandoned Erie-Lackawanna-Pennsylvania Railroad, Chris sat silently watching the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, preparing to take off, and sucked meditatively upon the red and white clover around him.
— Opening lines of A Life for the Stars, book 2 of Cities in Flight
The idea at the centre of the book is that of a powerful anti-gravity drive, the "spindizzy". Given that it doesn't depend on aerodynamics, you can attach it to pretty much anything big enough to hold the engines and turn that thing into an anti-gravity vehicle and, ultimately, a starship. Why not, reasons the author, strap it to a city; and so the cities of Earth become vast interstellar spaceships, scattering across the galaxy. The cities become nomadic; they wander space, looking for work to feed their populations and fuel their engines. In an intensely competitive environment, the value of their labour collapses to near-zero; Blish draws a direct analogy between his migrant cities and the impoverished "Okie" labourers who migrated west during America's Depression in the 1930s.
The spindizzy isn't the only novum in the sequence. Blish is full of ideas - Harlan Ellison, in his 2002 re-introduction to Dangerous Visions, referred to Blish as "likely the smartest one of us all".[1] His cities teem with invention: the "Dirac Transmitter" for instantaneous faster-than-light communication; the "City Father" AIs who run the cities; anagathic drugs that make citizens effectively immortal. What the cities don't have is many people. And those inhabitants you do meet are, by and large, unsympathetic.
They Shall Have Stars (1956) opens in 2013. The Soviet Union has survived and flourished; the West, in response, has become increasingly authoritarian; scientific research, stifled by the new political environment, has stagnated. Senator Bliss Wagoner of Alaska secretly funds two research programmes that will change everything: the spindizzy drive and the anti-agathic drugs. The novel is a McCarthyite thriller clumsily interleaved with hard SF speculation, and bears little resemblance to the space opera that follows.
A Life for the Stars (1962) introduces Chris deFord, a teenager shanghaied into service when the city of Scranton takes flight. He eventually transfers to New York and rises through the ranks under the mentorship of John Amalfi, New York's mayor. Because Blish wrote this as a young adult novel, it’s easily the most accessible of the four books. Nevertheless, if you read it knowing Chris’s ultimate fate (which we'll come to), even this seemingly lightweight adventure is dripping with bleak irony.
Earthman, Come Home (1955) is the core of the series, assembled from the original "Okie" stories, published by John W. Campbell's Astounding between 1950 and 1953. The premise is taken from the Great Depression of the 1930s, when economic conditions became so oppressive that whole populations set out onto the road to seek work, the setting of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Here, a similar economic collapse forces entire cities to blast off into space as itinerant, job-seeking vagrants. The settled planets, the "Statists", despise these wanderers and use the 1930s term "Okie" as a slur, painting the flying cities as cheap labour and thieves. Blish and Campbell brainstormed the background enthusiastically. Damon Knight spotted a logical flaw: why would a flying city bother with begging for odd jobs when it could manufacture goods and trade them? New York wanders the galaxy anyway, chasing contracts and dodging interstellar cops while civilisation falls apart around it. Being fixed up from short stories, the narrative is episodic, sometimes thrilling, although Mayor Amalfi's near-invincibility wears thin after a while. Manhattan ends up (accidentally) fleeing the galaxy entirely, and founds a New Earth colony in the Greater Magellanic Cloud.
The Triumph of Time (1958) - published in the UK as A Clash of Cymbals - brings it all to an end. Literally. Amalfi, bored with life on New Earth, decides that this is really all about him. The universe is dying; a collision between matter and antimatter is inevitable. Most science fiction heroes would try to stop it or escape it. Amalfi, in a final act of cosmic vanity, races a peaceful alien species to the centre of destruction, determined to ensure that the next universe is stamped with a human pattern (his own). He sacrifices his city - the thirty thousand silent ghosts who have served him for centuries - to ensure that the next cycle of history will repeat the same mistakes. He cannot abide a universe he does not influence. He must micromanage the Big Bang.
The original Masterworks edition included an essay on Blish's approach to future history, which was based on his reading of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West; the current version adds introductions by Adam Roberts and Stephen Baxter. Roberts suggests starting with Earthman, Come Home - the third book in internal chronology but the first published, closest to the original short stories. Baxter proposes A Life for the Stars as a launching point - the last written and most readable, though almost guaranteed to turn you against Amalfi when you discover Chris's fate. Tellingly, neither of them recommends the first book.
Blish wrote the four novels, numbered in the order you read them in Cities in Flight, in the order 3, 1, 4, 2 - that is, Earthman, Come Home first, then They Shall Have Stars, then The Triumph of Time, and finally A Life for the Stars.
Earthman, Come Home was in turn assembled in 1955 from four novellas published between 1950 and 1953: "Okie" and "Bindlestiff" in Campbell's Astounding (1950), "Sargasso of Lost Cities" in the pulpier Two Complete Science-Adventure Books (1953), and the titular "Earthman, Come Home" back in Astounding (1953). For the novelisation, Blish had to reconcile contradictory timelines, retcon the Vegan aliens from a vague threat into a consistent political tyranny across the earlier chapters, and rewrite "Sargasso" almost entirely to match the harder tone of its neighbours.
They Shall Have Stars is also a fix-up, built in 1956 from two separate, standalone stories published in 1952: "The Bridge" and "At Death's End". "The Bridge" - a novella about being trapped on Jupiter - produces the theoretical framework for the spindizzy (the "Blackett-Dirac equations", renamed the "Dillon-Wagoner equations" in the novel). "At Death's End" is the McCarthyite thriller. For the novel, the two stories are clumsily interleaved, and "The Bridge" is butchered in the process.
And then the entire sequence was, in turn, substantially rewritten and reordered when Cities in Flight was first collected as an anthology in 1970. This necessitated, as we'll see, a significant re-edit to make the continuity work.
The "fix-up" - Van Vogt's term for the haphazard stitching together of magazine serials - was in Blish's hands a deliberate act of system integration. He treated the 1970 omnibus like a refactoring project. He changed dates to fit the Spenglerian cycles and inserted or deleted characters wherever continuity demanded.
The most brutal of these patches concerns Chris deFord. In A Life for the Stars, Blish had created a new protagonist to give readers a relatable entry point. We watch Chris grow up, learn the ropes and finally make City Manager, the obvious successor to Amalfi. But Chris didn't exist in the original Earthman stories, which had Mark Hazleton as second-in-command. When the timelines merged in the 1970 omnibus, Chris deFord became a bug in the code.
Another writer might have rewritten the later books to include Chris. Blish decided to execute him. A single line in the bridging text informs us that the City Fathers killed Chris for a "contract violation."
Read today, it's a patch note. Chris deFord: deprecated functionality, status deleted.
Even the relentless refactoring couldn't patch everything. Grand space histories must necessarily - cf. everything from Foundation to Dune - have fake historical encyclopaedia references as epigraphs, and Cities in Flight is littered with contextual look-back summaries from the mysterious historian entity Acreff-Monales. But the entire universe is destroyed at the end of book four. How does this particular encyclopaedia galactica survive to compile its entries? It's a final unresolved bug in the sequence's rewritten architecture.
Blish didn't just purge characters for continuity. He layered on Spengler (to provide a philosophical underpinning) and then Wagner (for epic grandiosity), in that order, and both after the fact. Spengler gave his space hobos historical weight: the Okies as the last, frozen remnant of Western technological prowess, wandering the galaxy in the "Winter" phase of civilisation.
The name "Wagoner" - the senator who funds the spindizzy research in They Shall Have Stars - was an early musical hint, perhaps unconscious. Richard D. Mullen, a Professor of English at Indiana State University and later co-founder of the peer-reviewed journal Science Fiction Studies, spotted it, built his hypothesis around it, and published his essay mapping the four books onto Wagner's Ring Cycle in Riverside Quarterly in 1968. Blish, a musicologist and critic himself - writing as William Atheling, Jr. - adored this interpretation and adopted and blessed it by including the essay in the 1970 omnibus. Now, a real academic had decoded his work and the essay could act as a shield against anyone who might dismiss the book as mere space opera. The UK title of The Triumph of Time, A Clash of Cymbals, underlined the orchestral conceit.
How much of either framework was really there from the start? Probably some, though less than Blish would have you believe.
The "future history" was a staple of the Golden Age, of which the most famous, popular and commercially successful example was Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Just as Asimov had looked to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Blish looked to Spengler. Asimov's model is narrative and political: his competent men, acting rationally, can shorten the coming dark age. Blish's, on the other hand, is biological and fatalistic. Spengler treated cultures as living organisms with a fixed lifespan, moving from birth through maturity to death. There is no Seldon Plan here to help them avert the inevitable. Spengler's final "Winter" phase is dominated by the love of money and a disdain for intellectual creativity. Mankind has achieved immortality and conquered the stars, but culturally, humanity is already dead. It creates nothing new, and scavenges the galaxy for knowledge because it is no longer capable of original research.
The flying cities idea, however far-fetched, is magnificent. But the cities themselves are strangely empty. Although we're told New York is a metropolis, the on-page evidence suggests a ghost town. Its population is absurdly low - only twenty or thirty thousand people still inhabit the shell of Manhattan. Not a single art scene, protest movement or subculture appears on the page. Nobody bumps into anyone else on the city streets, goes shopping, stops for a drink or sees a show. The "citizens" are invisible, invoked only as a voting bloc to ratify the Mayor's decisions. There's none of the social furniture we'd normally associate with a modern city.
The cities' emptiness does fit the Spenglerian theme, perhaps more than Blish intended. The creative spark that once filled the city with noise and chaos is gone, and what remains is the humming silence of efficient administration. The City Fathers are vast banks of vacuum tubes and memory drums. They know everything but understand nothing. They can cite every law and calculate every course, but innovation is beyond them. They're risk-averse by design, perfectly logical, and thoroughly inhuman.
Amalfi is John W. Campbell's typical "Competent Man": the engineer-hero who solves problems through intellect and will. He's proto-Kirk, a charismatic captain who always knows best, whose hunches override the computer while the crew stands around admiring him. Blish went on to write the Star Trek novelisations. I wonder whether he recognised, in Kirk, an echo of his earlier creation. The city's real population is, in fact, its bridge crew. New York is the USS Enterprise writ large, with Amalfi as Captain and the City Fathers as ship's computer.
However, Amalfi sucks the oxygen out of every room and tolerates no rivals. Mark Hazleton, Amalfi's XO and closest friend, has a partner, Dee - and in the final novel, Amalfi decides to have an affair with her, just because. It's treated within the narrative with casual, proprietorial indifference.
The Chris deFord execution damns Amalfi's regime more than anything else in the series. We've just spent an entire novel watching this character grow up. Amalfi's protégé is clinically murdered by the payroll software for a contract violation, and he barely registers the loss. The Competent Man reveals himself as a leader so focused on the idea of competence that the humans inside the system are reduced to disposable components.
The Golden Age of Science Fiction is when you're twelve.[2]
I came to Cities in Flight about ten years ago, long past any golden age, with no childhood attachment to protect it. Roberts and Baxter wrote introductions I genuinely cannot understand. I suspect they read these books when they were young and gave them the free pass that early love provides. I didn’t, and I can’t.
I have affection for classic SF - real affection, born of that wall of Panther paperbacks in a caravan park shop in Wales. But I'm glad this wasn't the material I ended up reading first. When I read Cities in Flight now, I recoil at pretty much all of it: the empty cities, the disposable women, the protagonist who mistakes sociopathy for competence, the intellectual frameworks bolted on after the fact to disguise the poverty of the human content.
There was probably a vivacity in the original stories, quickly dated though it was - you had to appreciate the Depression references, for one thing - and "The Bridge", by itself and in its original form, was excellent early hard science fiction. But Blish's rewrites, his resequencing, with their resultant jarring tonal shifts, don't work. Moreover, it broke whatever was there in the first place. Then, on top of that, came all those competing layers of retrofitted meaning - Spengler, Wagner. The result is a mess. Those introductions by Roberts and Baxter - are they really praising the original ingredients, the actual Golden Age stories? Or are they praising this Frankenstein creation of 1970? I'm not sure, but I think and hope it's the former.
The Covers
The SF Masterworks edition uses part of a far larger painting by John Harris. Harris paints with a hazy, impressionistic style: vague vertical shapes that suggest skyscrapers, no windows, no doors, light and shadow making the structure look continent-sized. The full painting shows a distant blue city; but Gollancz crops to the engine, and the yellow-and-white spine edition zooms in further still, which rather misses the point. What works about the Harris image is the mood - cold, distant and monumental. It feels less like a city than a tombstone for humanity, which is exactly what these cities are.
Postscript
When I first started trying to write about Cities in Flight, a few years ago, I bought the definitive Blish biography: Imprisoned in a Tesseract by David Ketterer. I found my copy on AbeBooks. What I didn't know when I bought it was that the interior includes a sticker reading "Ex Libris John Brunner", with Brunner's signature alongside it. Blish and Brunner were critical allies in the UK scene; Blish championed Stand on Zanzibar and wrote an essay defending Brunner against charges of mere technician-hood. Throughout the biography, there are various "!!" exclamations written in the margins at odd intervals. I ought, at some point, to catalogue them.
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