The four books collected as Cities in Flight — They Shall Have Stars (1956, USA), A Life for the Stars (1962, USA), Earthman, Come Home (1955, USA) and The Triumph of Time (1959, USA) — have generally been considered together as a classic of the genre, so much so the omnibus was number three in the original SF Masterworks series published by Gollancz between 1999 and 2007. Certainly, Cities in Flight benefits from a memorable central premise — cities in the US leave planet Earth and flit about the galaxy, thanks to the “spindizzy”. While it’s true other nations than the USA are mentioned, it’s only in passing and, as in the majority of US science fiction published in the twentieth century, the future is as abundantly American as Americans seem to believe the present is.
The first novel, They Shall Have Stars, posits an Earth split between two states which map roughly onto the Soviet Bloc and the West as they existed during the Cold War. Fortunately, no one reads science fiction, especially US science fiction, for political analysis. In order to defend itself against the USSR, the US-led Bureaucratic State has become as oppressive and corrupt as the Soviets. Happily, it still possesses a few maverick industrialists (not that any such creature ever existed), one of whom runs a pharmaceutical company which invents an “anti-agathic” drug, making humans effectively immortal:
“Find the broad-range antitoxin that acts against the toxins of the human body which accumulate after growth stops — as penicillin and tetracycline act against the pregnancy toxin — and you’ve got your magic machine-gun against degenerative disease.”
The chapters describing this miracle of medicine are interspersed with chapters about a mysterious experiment on Jupiter, involving the construction of a gargantuan bridge made of ice — which makes no sense in story terms, or indeed scientific, but results in some nice descriptive prose — and which eventually leads to a sort of anti-gravity engine, the spindizzy. There is also a significant disconnect between the levels of technology in each narrative.
They Shall Have Stars is an expansion of two short stories, ‘Bridge’ (1952, USA) and ‘At Death’s End’ (1954, USA), and was originally published under the title, Year 2018!
In A Life for the Stars, published last but the second book of the series, cities around the world, but mostly in the US, are leaving the planet and heading out into the galaxy. For… Well, chiefly to get away. Something no doubt a majority of US citizens right now feel might be a good idea. These star-faring cities are known as “Okies”, which I think might be US hobo slang or something, in much the same way many US science fiction novels of last century encode pre-WWII vocabulary and society. The novel opens with a hillbilly being kidnapped by the departing city of Scranton, New Jersey. He is then sold to New York — because even in this libertarian future a US writer cannot conceive of an alternative to chattel slavery.
In Earthman, Come Home, the third book of the series, but fixed up from the stories ‘Okie’ (1950, USA), ‘Bindlestiff’ (1950, USA), ‘Sargasso of Lost Cities’ (1953, USA) and ‘Earthman, Come Home’ (1953, USA), the story focuses on New York, which is led by Mayor Amalfi — because science fiction believed in Great Men, a popular patriarchal model of history peddled in most nations from the sixteenth (?) through to the twentieth century. The novel tries to make the concept of a community of independent interstellar mobile cities plausible, but never really convinces; and also hints at a future history for the many settled worlds of the Milky Way — but… Settled by whom? There are some aliens, there are human worlds and human empires, but given the existence of the spindizzy, why should the galaxy be colonised following historical colonisation patterns? The novel ends with New York fleeing the Milky Way, after defeating the off-stage threat of the Vegans, and the more immediate threat of the Earth Police, for the Greater Magellanic Cloud.
The final book, The Triumph of Time, also published as A Clash of Cymbals, sees New York effectively conquering an agrarian world, grounding itself, and the city’s inhabitants settling down to a long-earned semi-immortal life of ease. Except. Oh noes. There’s an anti-matter universe and it will burst through into the real-matter universe in months, and create a new Big Bang. Annihilation for everyone and everything! The leadership team of New York (the actual population are barely mentioned) and the leaders of He, the magical planet New York rescued in the novel before, which they sent careering through inter-galactic space but which has since returned with a scientifically-sophisticated and -advanced population… Well, they come up with a plan to alter the formation of the universe created from this second Big Bang, in ways that, well, are not entirely clear.
There is another threat, a theocratic movement which is conquering all the planets in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and which seems undefeatable… But Amalfi renders it ineffective with half a page of argument, and the Warriors of God disappear from the story (so much so, the novel synopsis on Wikipedia never even mentions them.)
Blish famously based Cities in Flight on Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918–1922, Germany), and my copy of the omnibus (published by Avon in 1970) includes an afterword by Richard D Mullen, originally published in Riverside Quarterly (1968, USA) explicitly laying out the parallels. I don’t think the plot of Cities in Flight is especially important — and it would be strange if it was, given the books were partly cobbled together from short stories, published over several years and the omnibus generally arranges them in a different order to that in which they were originally published. The important thing here is the idea around which the four books were based — and I hesitate to dignify it with the label novum.
I remember reading a novel by James Blish which was also an expanded version of a short story. The Quincunx of Time (1973, USA) was based on the short story ‘Beep’, originally published in 1954. Rather than expand on the story or setting, Blish chose to deepen the made-up science behind the story’s central device, the “Dirac communicator”. And the same is true of Cities in Flight — it’s the bogus science which seems to float Blish’s boat, and not the open invitations in his story to widen story and characters.
The Triumph of Time puts this front and centre, as the story is entirely about the discovery of the impending Big Bang, the investigation of it, and the research into surviving it. There’s no drama here —even though the universe is ending! Blish is more interested in getting across his ideas on cosmology. Despite that, the main take-way from the series is the spindizzy — because the image of cities actually taking to the skies and travelling into outer space is both powerful and compelling.
I suspect the reputation of the Cities in Flight series rests mostly on its ambition, a not-uncommon state of affairs in the science fictions of last century — cf Asimov using Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789, UK) as inspiration for his Foundation stories. And perhaps even the concept of the Big Dumb Object, a staple of the genre, might itself be considered a signifier of ambition, although within the text rather than extra-textual. Famous examples include Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970, USA) and Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1973, Sri Lanka).
If so, it’s the framework of Cities in Flight, and Asimov’s Foundation, which are Big Dumb Objects, or at the very least analogous to them. Because both are expressions of artistic ambition — not intra-textual, but extra-textual. And Cities in Flight demonstrates many of the pitfalls of this. For a start, the inspiration must be made clear for it to impact readers’ responses to the text.
Cities in Flight also suffers because its story is concretized on the emblematic city of New York, and then further confused by Blish’s love of giving his made-up science depth — so much so the series’ inspiration in Spengler’s work, and indeed the point it’s actually trying to make, is buried. Because it wouldn’t be hard to cast Cities in Flight, despite the fact it’s an omnibus, as a carnival novel, in much the same way many popular US science fiction novels of the first half of last century can be read as carnival novels.
Or as Kipling’s Kim (1901, UK).
What a choice. Perhaps Spengler and Gibbon were better alternatives after all.
