Cities in Flight
James Blish
1970
This book is a compendium of the four 'Spindizzy Novels' that James Blish wrote over a period of 10 years. They were all brought together in this compendium in 1970.
The four books are Earthman, Come Home (1955), They Shall Have Stars (1956), The Triumph of Time (1958) and A Life for the Stars (1962). The first two of these were made up from stories originally published in various magazines and the final two published as books in the growing Science Fiction market of the time.
The above list is the order in which the books were published but the internal chronology is as follows:
They Shall Have Stars describes the dying days of Western civilisation as it is gradually swallowed up by the Bureaucratic State. In the books this is explicitly linked to the Soviet Union, but can basically be read as an argument against the increasing interference of the State in the lives of its citizens.
Scientific study has come to serve the State in thinking up ever more bigger bangs, but is unable to do blue sky studies - not only because of a crushing blanket of secrecy, but also a feeling that science has answered all the answerable questions.
However, a freshman Senator feels that there must be more and under that self-same blanket of secrecy, he institutes two possible studies that would give Earth the stars.
Despite a number of close calls the projects are carried through to completion and spindizzy powered ships travel out from the outer solar system in defiance of their home governments crewed by potentially deathless crews leaving the now not so freshman senator to die a traitor's death in a radioactive hell.
A Life for the Stars is set more than a thousand years in the future where Earth is the pastoral centre of a huge galactic sphere of influence. It's cities have all run off, using spindizzies, to find a fortune that is no longer possible to find on Earth itself.
In the novel, we follow the fortunes of a youngster swept up by a border patrol when Scranton goes Okie. Forced to be a part of the city, he lies his way into a position of precarious survivability in the town's hierarchy.
When Scranton runs across the tracks of another city, it is warned off but after a bit of dickering Scranton passes over all those, like our Chris, who it can't properly feed. Thus it is that Chris is introduced to the presence of John Amalfi, Mayor of New York, the best known Okie city in the Galaxy.
Chris finds an educational opportunity amongst the New Yorkers as the City Fathers ruthlessly force feed him the knowledge he needs to become the city's first City Manager. But first he has to survive his own impulsive nature!
Earthman, Come Home is set several centuries after ALftS and John Amalfi is still guiding the fortunes of New York as Mayor though Chris has been replaced as City Manager.
The city has been going through a particularly bad patch and finds itself taking on a desperate contract in order to stay on track, but all it manages to get out of it is a partner for the City Manager. And a tail of Earth Police ships all eager to have the scalp of the infamous New York. In order to escape them, Amalfi heads for the Great Rift and a singleton star.
Unfortunately the inhabited planet circling this star has also been sought out by a bindlestiff - a city that preys on other okies, hated by all! Amalfi wangles a contract from what passes for the planetary government to rid the planet of the jungle that had destroyed its civilisation.
Not sure how to fulfil this contract, Amalfi comes up with the stunning proposal to outfit the whole planet with spindizzies and sending it into intergalactic space. Now all he had to do was get rid of the planetary rebels and the bindlestiff. And the Earth Police, hunting both New York and the bindlestiff.
Once the planet was safely on its way, New York makes its own escape, but is forced to damage its spindizzies in order to decelerate.
Thinking itself rich, New York makes its way to a repair yard where it requests repairs but the cheque bounced when they learn that the currency is now based on drugs (which they had failed to stock up on!) not the germanium that filled their treasuries. Escaping barely ahead of the angry locals, Amalfi is forced to take New York into an okie jungle.
Once there, he forces the rest of the okies to march on Earth in order to demand better treatment but he had an ulterior motive; a supposedly mythical Orbital Fortress from destroyed Vega. From his control room in City Hall, it's Amalfi's hand that guides the asteroid that destroys the camoflagued fortress as it penetrated Earth's defences.
However, the city's spindizzies are completely shattered now, just good enough to let the city run for the Greater Magellanic Cloud, but incapable of lifting the city from it's final resting place.
The Triumph of Time is set a few generations after ECH, when the former inhabitants of New York have spread out over their new world and appear to be making a go of civilisation in the LMC. Back in the main galaxy, it would appear that the time of Earth's ascendancy has come to an end as an alien race by the name of the Web of Andromena absorb whole systems into their strange society.
However, of more concern to the terrans is the return of an old friend; the Hevians had gained control of their planet, making it possible to guide it from Amalfi's random course. In the course of their travels they found evidence that the heat death of the Universe is at hand and is about to make the final collapse to the Primal Monobloc.
With the help of the City Fathers, a probe was designed and built to examine the oncoming death and see what lay ahead. To their surprise, they found that it would be possible to influence the future shapes of successor universes.
But you had to be at the mathematical centre of the universe as the Monobloc formed and the Web of Andromena was on the same trail as the ex okies and the Hevians.
This is part of the Science Fiction Masterworks series
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