Characters are cardboard stereotypes for the most part and the story really betrays .. 'Cities in Flight' is part of the SF Masterworks series, hailed as one of the "Cities in Flight" is hard science fiction, with hard science, chemical formulas .. reminiscent of a Saturday morning serial adventure or a B grade 50s sci-fi movie.
Table of contents
- Science fiction
- Cities in Flight (Cities in Flight, #) by James Blish
- ‘Interstellar’ and the 10 Most Realistic Space Travel Films
- Get A Copy
Archived from the original on October 16, Retrieved April 10, Archived from the original on November 18, Archived from the original on October 6, Retrieved September 16, Archived from the original on April 10, Archived from the original on December 4, Archived from the original on September 17, Archived from the original on April 4, Archived from the original on December 21, Retrieved December 20, Archived from the original on June 26, Retrieved June 10, Retrieved October 7, Christopher Nolan Warns Theatre Owners: Archived from the original on October 4, Archived from the original on February 2, Archived from the original on July 19, Archived from the original on December 1, Archived from the original on July 4, Retrieved June 26, Archived from the original on February 12, Retrieved February 12, Creating the Various Aircrafts [ sic ]".
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Retrieved October 29, McConaughey v the whole wide world". Retrieved 27 July Retrieved November 6, Star Trek Into Greatness". Archived from the original on February 11, Archived from the original on November 4, Retrieved November 4, Archived from the original on October 28, Archived from the original on December 29, Retrieved December 29, Archived from the original on June 16, Retrieved November 23, Archived from the original on December 5, Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar " ". The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Retrieved March 20, Martin, George March 8, Stuff Not By Me". Archived from the original on April 22, Retrieved May 23, Retrieved January 15, Films directed by Christopher Nolan. Doodlebug Quay Person of Interest — Westworld —present. Empire Award for Best Film. The Last Jedi Artificial Intelligence Minority Report X2: The Force Awakens Rogue One: Film portal Speculative fiction portal. Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history. In other projects Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote. There are certain scenes in this volume technically comprising four separate books which are breathtaking, and would give any recent Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster a run for its money.
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Sadly these are largely drowned out by the noise that is the interminable remainder of the book. Mar 13, The other John rated it it was ok Shelves: This sucker is actually four novels collected into a single volume. The collection starts with They Shall Have Stars. The year is 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 This sucker is actually four novels collected into a single volume.
Amidst this all is a scheme of Alaskan senator Bliss Wagoner, which is playing out in a lab on Earth and a gigantic construction project in the atmosphere of Jupiter. They Shall Have Stars was entertaining enough. The story seemed dated in many ways, but in others it seemed eerily prescient. A Life for the Stars is the second tale in the collection, set centuries after the first. Humanity has discovered the gravitronpolarity generator, or "spindizzy" and over the years, first factories, then entire cities have used this gravity cancelling device to leave Earth and propel themselves through interstellar space.
Chris deFord gets press ganged onto the departing city of Scranton and begins a new life among the stars. Story 3, Earthman Come Home , is the first and best of the tales to have been written. It's the saga of the city of New York, an "okie" city travelling the stars and looking for work. The Triumph of Time closes out the volume. Mayor Amalfi comes out of retirement to face a final challenge, one that will have significance for the entire universe. It was the least satisfying of the four stories. Overall, the book is good, classic science fiction.
The concept of space faring cities is intriguing, though it failed to truly grab hold of my imagination. But it was enough to carry me through dozens of lunch breaks, so I can't really complain. Mar 26, Kate Sherrod rated it liked it. 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.
Science fiction
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: But so anyway, the novels. 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. 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? 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! Jan 15, Anthony added it. Blish chose cities as his medium of exploring space but totally neglected to incorporate city information or life into his stories. 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 Disappointing. For such a famous place that was no information about any of it. The book should have been four times as long.
It may as well have been a story about a small spaceship with a crew of 8 and a computer. Mar 27, Carolyn rated it it was amazing. I read this back when it was first published, and I can still remember the excitement and wonder I felt when I first encountered these startling ideas. This is one of the original ground breaking novels, from the truly Golden Age of SciFi. 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, As a pure science fiction collection, this was first rate. 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. 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.
Cities in Flight (Cities in Flight, #) by James Blish
The sad aspects of the story involve the realization of how little progress has been made. The story begins in 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 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. Mar 19, Bill Wellham rated it it was ok. 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. 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 s New York prevail; with Chrysler building, streets and blocks, full of characters which have walked straight out of a fifties b-movie.
‘Interstellar’ and the 10 Most Realistic Space Travel Films
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??
Like travelling repairmen moving from planet to planet, working for a living. 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. View all 3 comments. A very attactivve librarian in a sundress. 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. It's a race, a literal race against time and bad guys, not to save the universe but to create a new one. When I got to the last page I was stunned by the creativity and thought Blish put into this singular triumph of the will and individual. Highly recommended for anybody interested in "classic" sci-fi where an author knew how to deliver a message without resorting to cliches and pretentious stereotyping. From a technical standpoint, I was thrilled to buy this edition in hardcover. This is one of the benchmark books in the world of "hard" science fiction and Blish did a superb job of creating one of the most unusual, but believable, cultures in the genre.
I've read this book 3 times and, if I live long enough, will probably do so again in a few years. I have one caveat, and it's something that many SF writers did in the early years. Too much scientific 'baflegab". And not simple baflegab, but stuff that would challenge the attention span of an advanced nuclear scientist. Fo This is one of the benchmark books in the world of "hard" science fiction and Blish did a superb job of creating one of the most unusual, but believable, cultures in the genre. Fortunately, a lazy reader, like me, can skip over those bits without losing the thrust of the story line.
Apr 09, Valerie added it. 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.
What I'd like to find if I reread the t 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. What I'd like to find if I reread the things today is a technical discussion of how the cities were levitated and maintained in flight.
I have to admit to not remembering that part--it may not've been very detailed. Aug 08, Charles rated it it was amazing Shelves: This is actually 4 complete novels. 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. I bought this omnibus a few years ago, following some recommendation here on GR, I think. I had never heard of James Blish, let alone read any of his works. There's a quote from Terry Pratchett on the cover: I can only agree, because it's indeed science!
You get enough mathematics, chemistry and physics thrown at you over t I bought this omnibus a few years ago, following some recommendation here on GR, I think. You get enough mathematics, chemistry and physics thrown at you over the course of the four books. If you don't have enough basic? There are four books, but they are related, even if the story time-line is spread over several thousands of years from the Cold War, or 20th century, to somewhere in Blish's writing style also doesn't allow to fly through the book s , let alone the rather flat characters.
It was hard to sympathise with any of them, although Mayor John Amalfi was, especially in the last book, becoming a real annoyance, stuck-up and what not. The introduction is done by Adam Roberts, who wrote that, while the books are ordered chronologically as they are to be placed on the stories' time-line , it's best to start with the first one that was written, i.
Since I didn't like to go back and forth, I decided to start from the beginning: They Shall Have Stars. The blurb mentioned longevity drugs and anti-gravity devices spindizzies. The spindizzies were developed to set up space flight and discover new planets to conquer to establish a new empire, a new life away from Earth, where the Cold War had been going on far longer than it had in reality and Russia had kicked the West's butt.
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Hence the world looking totally different. Some US cities no sign of anything European, though, or I must have overlooked it then took to space, thanks to those anti-gravity devices and looked for income and settlement elsewhere.
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Of course, fierce competition arises, etcetera, etcetera. I never had the impression a new empire was being built. It was more about exploring space, looking for new adventures, new settlements and enough resources to survive. The longevity drugs are a consequence of the space flight. Instead of antibiotics, you take something to prolong your life for several tens of years.
If you take the pills at 70, then you'll be 70 for a few decades, with your health staying like that. It's thus better to take the drugs at a younger age, obviously. Learning is not done via traditional means, but through hypnopedia or sleep-learning: Computers stuff any required teachings, subjects, There's also supervision of the city and internal political decisions with the City Fathers, which I think are large computers server-like?
There are, at the end, afterwords by Stephen Baxter who gave his advice and background info on the books, content-wise and its historical value and Richard D. Mullen who gave a philosophical analysis, based on Oswald Spengler's book The Decline of the West , on the Earthmanist culture that was a main theme in the books. Or, added value that is always good to have with such books. I can see why it has been republished, why it's considered a "classic", as it deals with some interesting and "new" themes at least at the time of writing , but I found it relatively hard to get through.
I will not go into further detail about the content. Other readers have done a very good job at that, so I'll just link to e. Sath 's reviews, which are detailed enough. I also agree, on a general level, with her points of critique, although we differ in rating the books. They Shall Have Stars: Nov 11, Kevin Rubin rated it liked it.
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 "Cities in Flight" is hard science fiction, with hard science, chemical formulas and mathematical equations tossed in to clarify concepts the characters talk about. 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.