Cities in Flight

Cities in Flight is an omnibus of four novels in James Blish's "Okie" series and one of the representative works of science fiction's Golden Age in the twentieth century. The whole book rests on two premises: antigravity technology (the "spindizzy" engine) allows an entire city to lift off the surface and rise into space, while an anti-aging drug lets humans live for centuries or even millennia. With these two technologies, Earth's cities, led by their city managers and mayors, set off in groups toward the stars like migrant laborers of the Great Depression era, surviving by selling technology, labor, and knowledge. The book comprises four works, best read in chronological order: They Shall Have Stars tells the origin of the two key discoveries and serves as the prehistory of the whole series; A Life for the Stars covers the era when, after generations of antigravity, cities leave the ground en masse and become interstellar wanderers; Earthman, Come Home follows New York City mayor John Amalfi and depicts trade, rivalry, and plunder among the wandering cities—the core work first written in the series, whose novella version won a Retro Hugo; and The Triumph of Time drives the story to a cosmic-scale endpoint, as Amalfi and the inhabitants of "New Earth" confront the discovery that the entire universe is about to end. Blish set out to write a "future history," painting on a grand canvas the long prospect of humanity's expansion into the cosmos, and tracing how politics, economics, and belief evolve within the ancient community of the city on an interstellar scale. The descriptions of antigravity, interstellar communication, and cosmological extrapolation are notably concrete, combining hard-SF reasoning with the sweep of space opera, and the book was voted one of the best novels published before 1965 by the Science Fiction Writers of America.