Cities in Flight

James Blish

Jan 2005 · Penguin

About this ebook

Long out of print, the science fiction masterpiece by Hugo Award-winning writer James Blish

Originally published in four volumes nearlyfifty years ago, Cities in Flight brings together the famed "Okie novels" of science fiction master James Blish. Named after the migrant workers of America's Dust Bowl, these novels convey Blish's "history of the future," a brilliant and bleak look at a world where cities roam the Galaxy looking for work and a sustainable way of life.

In the first novel, They Shall Have Stars, man has thoroughly explored the Solar System, yet the dream of going even further seems to have died in all but one man. His battle to realize his dream results in two momentous discoveries anti-gravity and the secret of immortality. In A Life for the Stars, it is centuries later and antigravity generations have enabled whole cities to lift off the surface of the earth to become galactic wanderers. In Earthman, Come Home, the nomadic cities revert to barbarism and marauding rogue cities begin to pose a threat to all civilized worlds. In the final novel, The Triumph of Time, historyrepeats itself as the cities once again journey back in to space making a terrifying discovery which could destroy the entire Universe. A serious andhaunting vision of our world and its limits, Cities in Flight marks the return to print of one of science fiction's most inimitable writers.

A Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club

Ratings and reviews

I recently finished reading a tattered old copy that was falling apart as I read it. I thought it hard to put down, but be warned that this author takes the "science" part very seriously. Some pages actually had physics equations, chemical equations, and chemical formulae. And sometimes I wasn't sure which of those were real science and were fiction.

Great book! Read a sample, very intersting, though vegans are rarely mentioned.

Excellent sci-fi epic on a grand scale.

About the author

James Blish (1921–1975) was a novelist whose most popular works include Jack of Eagles and his Cities in Flight series, about people fleeing a declining Earth to seek new homes among the stars. He attended Rutgers University and received a bachelor of arts degree in microbiology before serving as a medical technician in World War II, and was an early member of the Futurians, a group of science fiction writers, fans, editors, and publishers. In 1959, Blish received the Hugo Award for his novel A Case of Conscience. He was also a prolific short fiction writer and a major contributor to the Star Trek saga, rewriting scripts into anthologies and producing original stories and screenplays.