A review by kundor
Cities In Flight by James Blish

3.0

The first two novels (They Shall Have Stars, and A Life for the Stars) were the best. The third novel, Earthman, Come Home, was munged together from a variety of stories which were written years earlier than the other novels, which were written as novels. As a result, ECH suffers from a lack of plot arc, bad pacing, anticlimaxes, and is riddled with internal inconsistency. The author had some work to do on comprehending his scales, also (a major point is the difficulty of fitting 300 city-sized objects comfortably into a solar system; our heroes have to park 18 AU out. Except that these cities came, in the first place, FROM EARTH, so they are known to fit in a tiny fraction of a 1 AU orbit! Come on; they could all fit inside the orbit of Mercury and not even know the rest of them were there!) I also just didn't like the protagonist, Amalfi, that much; he never really shows us why he deserves to be in charge, repeatedly doing gross damage to the city, causing the deaths of citizens, etc. for no particularly compelling reason. People go on at length about atrocities committed by the "mad" city, IMT, thousands of years before, but Amalfi does things nearly as bad without even appearing to think about it, and nobody bats an eye.

So, Amalfi's presence is probably why I didn't like the last novel, Triumph of Time, either, despite it being written as a novel. The first two, however, are definitely worth reading. TSHS begins in 2013, so it's timely!