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joosty's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
nwhyte's review against another edition
http://nhw.livejournal.com/370816.html[return][return]The full series in a single volume, containing They Shall Have Stars, A Life For The Stars, Earthman, Come Home and The Triumph of Time (aka A Clash of Cymbals).[return][return]The first book, They Shall Have Stars, is set off from the other three by being set in the near future, on a recognisable Cold War earth; I was slightly amused to note mention of Eritrea and Latvia as independent states, which must have seemed rather less likely than the end of the Cold War back when it was first written in 1957. (Heck, here I am in the capital city of a country that nobody had heard of a hundred years ago.) Story not especially engaging, a reflection really on contemporary US politics, McCarthyism, the space program, J. Edgar Hoover, the likelihood that the West would lose to Communism. The central character, Senator Wagoner, starts a trend for the rest of the series by working out a complex plan manipulating his political enemies into allowing his ideas to triumph.[return][return]I think I first read A Life For The Stars perhaps even before I left primary school - I seem to remember having to look up the word "concubine" in my dictionary. It was the last to be written, certainly the best of the four I think. A Bildungsroman of young Chris deFord, who accidentally leaves earth with the flying city of Scranton Pennsylvania; using the techniques sponsored by Wagoner ni the first novel, cities have been flying around the universe for ages by now. Chris ends up on New York and saves the day. Generally good stuff, although Chris' only close friend (the one with the concubines) gets treated pretty badly by the author.[return][return]Earthman, Come Home is supposed to be the real classic of the series, with one of its component novellas winning a retro-Hugo last year. I didn't completely understand why (well, I suppose the fact that the other stories in the running for the retro-Hugo were much more obscure may help explain why). Mayor Amalfi of New York (Blish having disposed of Chris deFord in a casual half-sentence) feels a bit like Doctor Who but in a city-sized TARDIS, advised by the computers known as the City Fathers, zooming from one episodic scrape to another, in the penultimate episode saving humanity at the cost of eternal exile. I didn't think it really hung together all that well, and by this stage Amalfi's habit of working out a complex plan manipulating his political enemies into allowing him to triumph was beginning to annoy me.[return][return]The series ends with a bit of a whimper. The Triumph of Time has lots of grand ideas, stabs at character development both of the established characters from earlier volumes and of a romantic young couple, and the end of the world as we know it; but doesn't really deliver on any of them. A bit disappointing. There's a rather pointless essay postscript about Blish and the historical theories of Spengler, by one Richard D. Mullen; perhaps I was just tired by then but I didn't feel it had added much to my understanding of the book.[return][return]However the audacity of Blish's vision and his ability to make you suspend your disbelief in flying cities do help the series as a whole succeed. And apart from the end the plotting is generally solid. Good old-fashioned stuff.
ellisknox's review against another edition
3.0
Reminded me a bit of Heinlein--much of the book is about being independent, self-reliant. A bit preachy but good adventure.
michaeldrakich's review against another edition
4.0
With four novels in one book, the tendency to want to reviews this series, each book does stand alone, is to start with the first novel and go through to the last. After completing it, the thing that occurred to me is the only proper way to review this is not in the sequence in which the stories play out, but in the order in which they were written.
To do so, I must start with the third book in the series - Earthman, Come Home. Although originally a number of short stories, it was complied together into a novel in 1955. As a result, it does read as what it is, a number of short stories with a common theme and characters. Still, it is enjoyable as both a space opera, and to some degree, hard scifi. Now the series is known for its hard scifi, but in this novel, it is limited. They still use slide rules, for gosh sake! No, the real hard scifi shows up much more prevalent in the next two Blish wrote. Outside of the main character, Mayor Amalfi, the reader never really gets to identify with the others. It has a very omniscient feel. My opinion on this one, 4 out of 5 stars.
The second book released is actually the first book in the series - They Shall Have Stars. I'll tell you right now, this was my favorite. Not only did I identify with the characters, but the science aspects of this novel were excellent. Running along two tracks, anti-gravity, which leads to the creation of the spindizzies, and anti-aging, in essence eternal life. This story is split between things on Earth and events on Jupiter and its moons. Very compelling, with many references to politics of the time - McCarthism, the cold war, and more. A very solid 5 out of 5 stars. I loved this one.
The third book Blish released was the closer - The Triumph Of Time. A fair warning here.If you have any adversity to an abundance of techno-babel, I wouldn't read this. You will not enjoy it. Blish attempts to include just about every macro physics theory, as well as quantum ones, in conjunction with a lot of nonsensical math, do drive the average reader over the edge. With an ending that I am ambivalent toward, I cannot give this novel more than 4 stars out of 5.
Lastly, the second novel in the series is - A Life For The Stars. Written four years after the rest, this short work is clearly nothing more than solid space opera. Hard science doesn't play a part. In all honesty, I would recommend any reader of this collection to entirely skip this story. Far and away the weakest, but most disappointing is that the main character, who the reader becomes endeared to, disappears in the third book and is reported killed. I found this strange and wondered why the author did it. He could very well have used the character who replaced him in the third novel. For this one as a stand alone, 3 out of 5 stars, but in this collection, it drops to a 2 star.
Examining all four books as a single novel, it's less than a 4 star novel, but I'm not prepared to drop it to 3 as it is definitely better than that. So finally, I shall consider it a 4 star rounded up.
To do so, I must start with the third book in the series - Earthman, Come Home. Although originally a number of short stories, it was complied together into a novel in 1955. As a result, it does read as what it is, a number of short stories with a common theme and characters. Still, it is enjoyable as both a space opera, and to some degree, hard scifi. Now the series is known for its hard scifi, but in this novel, it is limited. They still use slide rules, for gosh sake! No, the real hard scifi shows up much more prevalent in the next two Blish wrote. Outside of the main character, Mayor Amalfi, the reader never really gets to identify with the others. It has a very omniscient feel. My opinion on this one, 4 out of 5 stars.
The second book released is actually the first book in the series - They Shall Have Stars. I'll tell you right now, this was my favorite. Not only did I identify with the characters, but the science aspects of this novel were excellent. Running along two tracks, anti-gravity, which leads to the creation of the spindizzies, and anti-aging, in essence eternal life. This story is split between things on Earth and events on Jupiter and its moons. Very compelling, with many references to politics of the time - McCarthism, the cold war, and more. A very solid 5 out of 5 stars. I loved this one.
The third book Blish released was the closer - The Triumph Of Time. A fair warning here.If you have any adversity to an abundance of techno-babel, I wouldn't read this. You will not enjoy it. Blish attempts to include just about every macro physics theory, as well as quantum ones, in conjunction with a lot of nonsensical math, do drive the average reader over the edge. With an ending that I am ambivalent toward, I cannot give this novel more than 4 stars out of 5.
Lastly, the second novel in the series is - A Life For The Stars. Written four years after the rest, this short work is clearly nothing more than solid space opera. Hard science doesn't play a part. In all honesty, I would recommend any reader of this collection to entirely skip this story. Far and away the weakest, but most disappointing is that the main character, who the reader becomes endeared to, disappears in the third book and is reported killed. I found this strange and wondered why the author did it. He could very well have used the character who replaced him in the third novel. For this one as a stand alone, 3 out of 5 stars, but in this collection, it drops to a 2 star.
Examining all four books as a single novel, it's less than a 4 star novel, but I'm not prepared to drop it to 3 as it is definitely better than that. So finally, I shall consider it a 4 star rounded up.
bruc79's review against another edition
2.0
Está quadrilogia é construída com uma abordagem tão Hard Sf que se torna desgastante, entediante e desinteressante de ler a partir do terceiro livro. Como explorava o conceito de viagem espaciais pensei que seria estimulante, como parte do eixo de invenção de um retardador de envelhecimento para permitir um conceito de imortalidade dentro de sociedades a explorar o espaço isso é um desafio para a manutenção do equilíbrio das sociedades. Depois apresenta a invenção da anti-gravidade e cria o conceito das cidades voadoras com uma cúpula que permite sustentar a sua sobrevivência a longo prazo. Mas ao contrário de Asimov que com a Fundação cria um interesse continuo na criação de um mundo via uma lógica e uma escrita simples mas muito apelativo a complexidade de Blish torna-se gradualmente desgastante. Foi uma triste desilusão
samsamsam's review
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
kateofmind's review against another edition
3.0
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. And the author.*
Cities in Flight is actually an omnibus edition of four novels Blish published in the 1950s: They Shall Have Stars, A Life for the Stars, Earthman Come Home, and The Triumph of Time. I could have read them discretely as I often do with such collections, but I found the central conceit of these stories -- that a pair of technologies developed in the early 21st century allowed entire Earth cities like New York and Los Angeles and Pittsburgh and Scranton to lift themselves bodily, buildings, subways and all, from the planet's surface and go into space as giant spaceships** -- so compelling that I just kept right on going after the first novel, which detailed the development of the twin technologies, a gravity defying/harnessing field called the "spindizzy" and anti-aging drugs, that would allow this weird feat to be possible. 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. These span from the political/budgetary machinations that made the spacefaring "Okie" cities possible, to a tale of a young man kidnapped by the departing city of Scranton, Pennsylvania who later rises, out in the galaxy, to become a man of some importance after he is traded off as useless to New York, NY, to the story of the mayor of New York's thousand-year reign and the tribulations faced by a city whose motto "Mow your lawn, lady?" encapsulates its willingness to do any crappy job, anywhere in the universe, in a universe whose economy is collapsing, to that same city's final establishment as actually being the center of the universe that many of us assume New Yorkers think it to be anyway. Heh.
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. But that's okay. 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?
*I have mostly known Mr. 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! was more than a bit brilliant, and it was on the strength of this (and the inclusion of two Blish works in the SF Masterworks series) that made me want to read the man's "own" work.
**Doctor Who fans will be hopping up and down and screaming about The Beast Below, and surely that episode owes a lot to these novels. No starwhales, though.
Cities in Flight is actually an omnibus edition of four novels Blish published in the 1950s: They Shall Have Stars, A Life for the Stars, Earthman Come Home, and The Triumph of Time. I could have read them discretely as I often do with such collections, but I found the central conceit of these stories -- that a pair of technologies developed in the early 21st century allowed entire Earth cities like New York and Los Angeles and Pittsburgh and Scranton to lift themselves bodily, buildings, subways and all, from the planet's surface and go into space as giant spaceships** -- so compelling that I just kept right on going after the first novel, which detailed the development of the twin technologies, a gravity defying/harnessing field called the "spindizzy" and anti-aging drugs, that would allow this weird feat to be possible. 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:
Cities In Flight from Charlie McCulloch on Vimeo.
But so anyway, the novels. These span from the political/budgetary machinations that made the spacefaring "Okie" cities possible, to a tale of a young man kidnapped by the departing city of Scranton, Pennsylvania who later rises, out in the galaxy, to become a man of some importance after he is traded off as useless to New York, NY, to the story of the mayor of New York's thousand-year reign and the tribulations faced by a city whose motto "Mow your lawn, lady?" encapsulates its willingness to do any crappy job, anywhere in the universe, in a universe whose economy is collapsing, to that same city's final establishment as actually being the center of the universe that many of us assume New Yorkers think it to be anyway. Heh.
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. But that's okay. 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?
*I have mostly known Mr. 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! was more than a bit brilliant, and it was on the strength of this (and the inclusion of two Blish works in the SF Masterworks series) that made me want to read the man's "own" work.
**Doctor Who fans will be hopping up and down and screaming about The Beast Below, and surely that episode owes a lot to these novels. No starwhales, though.
rhleblanc963's review
5.0
Yeah, it's dated now, but when I first read it opened a world of possibilities. Virtually the only book I've read more than once. Still enjoy the characters.
ianjsimpson's review
3.0
https://theforgottengeek.wordpress.com/2017/12/24/the-history-of-science-fiction-literature-challenge-cities-in-flight-by-james-blish-1950/