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stephenmeansme's review
3.0
THEY SHALL HAVE STARS ***½ | Actually a prologue to the whole "Okie city" business, following the discovery of the two technologies that make it possible. Well done.
A LIFE FOR THE STARS **½ | A peasant kid from 31st century Pennsylvania gets press-ganged aboard the city of Scranton before it takes off into space as an Okie city. The beginning is good but it has a very serialized, pulpy feel. The cities, for all their weird appeal, don't really get fleshed out.
That's probably because the idea is inherently ludicrous - cities are not self-contained ecosystems. Blish also somehow makes the world of 30XX seem more like regular old 1962 (the year of publication) than even his fictional 2018 of the first story. (New York has almost a million people, wowzers!) Although he's ahead of the spec-fic curve when it comes to A.I. - I wonder if Iain M. Banks' Culture ships and Minds were a sort of one-upmanship on Blish here.
Overall, 3 stars if you can chew the pulp.
A LIFE FOR THE STARS **½ | A peasant kid from 31st century Pennsylvania gets press-ganged aboard the city of Scranton before it takes off into space as an Okie city. The beginning is good but it has a very serialized, pulpy feel. The cities, for all their weird appeal, don't really get fleshed out.
That's probably because the idea is inherently ludicrous - cities are not self-contained ecosystems. Blish also somehow makes the world of 30XX seem more like regular old 1962 (the year of publication) than even his fictional 2018 of the first story. (New York has almost a million people, wowzers!) Although he's ahead of the spec-fic curve when it comes to A.I. - I wonder if Iain M. Banks' Culture ships and Minds were a sort of one-upmanship on Blish here.
Overall, 3 stars if you can chew the pulp.
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