The final instalment of James Blish’s Cities in Flight tetralogy opens with yet another prologue reminding us of the key dates in its ‘future history’ (pp.477-79):
Cities in Flight chronology
2018 discovery of the first anti-agathic drugs
2019 discovery of the gravitron polarity generator
2105 establishment of the Bureaucratic State
2289 first contact with the Vegan Tyranny
2394 IMT sack Thor V
2310 Battle of Altair with Vegans
2413 struggle with Vegans ends with scorching of Vega
2464 Battle of BD 40º 4048′ between Earth and Hruntans
2522 collapse of the Bureaucratic State
3089 Admiral Hrunta is poisoned / John Amalfi becomes mayor of New York
3111 Arpa Hrunta installed as ‘Emperor of Space’ / New York takes flight
3600 New York lands on Utopia
3602 ‘reduction of the Duchy of Gort’ / Dr Schloss boards New York
3900 collapse of the germanium standard for currency
3905 Battle of the Jungle in the Acolyte Cluster
3944 New York lands on the Blasted Heath
3948 Battle of the Blasted Heath in which New York defeats the IMT
3975 Battle of Earth attacked by Okie cities
3976 passage of anti-Okie law on earth
3978 New York leaves the galaxy for the Magellanic Cloud
3998 New York lands on planet in the Magellanic Cloud
3999 New York christens this planet New Earth
4104 ‘totally universal physical cataclysm’
In the series of events preceding this book and described in Earthman, Come Home, John Amalfi had steered the space-flying Okie city of New York through umpteen perils and finally out of the galaxy altogether to land, once and for all, on a planet in the Magellanic Cloud.
‘Once and for all’ because a) after the Battle of Earth, Okie cities had been outlawed b) at least two of the city’s spindizzy engines were fatally malfunctioning.
After defeating the incumbent inhabitants of this planet – the Intergalactic Master Traders who were the bad guys who had annihilated Thor V centuries earlier – the inhabitants of New York named the planet New Earth and settled down to make it home.
(NB some of the dates don’t match up. For example, in the prologue Blish says New York landed on this final planet in 3998 (p.479) but in the text he says they fought the Battle of the Blasted Heath by which they won control of the planet in 3948 (p.483) – fifty years earlier. They can’t both be right. Similarly, he says the Okies christened the planet New Earth in 3999 (p.479), and yet the novel opens with Amalfi sick and bored of life on New Earth, in ‘this year of 3995’, four years earlier (p.497). Either I’m misunderstanding something, or this was poor proofreading by Blish and/or his editors.)
So it is 3995 and legendary Okie city mayor John Amalfi, blessed or cursed with a very long life, is bored of his peaceful existence on New Earth, of fancy fashions and outlandish pets, and misses the old space-flying days. He goes poking around the now-abandoned city of New York, chatting to the city’s former chief astronomer, Jake Freeman, about maybe salvaging part of it and going roaming again… when he’s told a huge object is heading their way.
This turns out to be the planet He, which we last met in Earthman, Come Home, the planet with a primitive civilisation which was cursed with an oppressively tropical jungle climate. Amalfi had made a contract to change and improve it by fitting spindizzies to the planet’s cardinal points. He had intended to alter its spin a little to give it a milder climate but ended up miscalculating and sending the planet careering not only out of the orbit of its sun, but flying faster than the speed of light right out of the galaxy itself.
Now, by some miracle, He’s people have mastered the technique of steering their planet (!) and are heading straight for New Earth. Radio communication is made and it turns out the entire planet is now led by our old friend Miramon, who had been Amalfi’s lead contact in the original story. Miramon explains that they made it all the way to the next galaxy in the universe, Andromeda, but on the way discovered something: All of space and time is coming to an end!
The reason is something to do with anti-matter. The rest of the book is now dominated by page after page of detailed, would-be highly scientific discussion of the relationship between matter and anti-matter, with reference to all kinds of theories and explanations invoking Einstein, quantum physics, and so on. It’s all very impressive and features a number of mathematical equations, but remains incomprehensible to me, and could all be bluff as far as I know. Basically, the cleverest scientists on he and on New Earth discuss whether a) the universe really is running down heading towards an apocalyptic end b) what this end will look like c) if there is any possible way to escape it.
When Amalfi takes New Earth’s top scientists to He to discuss the situation, he takes along Dee, wife of his deputy Mark Hazleton, with whom he is himself deeply in love, and Mark and Dee’s grandson Webster Hazleton, along with his ‘friend’ Estelle Freeman (daughter of Jake the astronomer). Against the backdrop of the end of the universe is played out the growing puppy love between these two young teenagers. For example, there is a long and completely unnecessary scene where the two New Earth kids are shown complicated games with the kids their own age from He, both sides translating the complex rules of the games into pidgen English for the readers’ benefit.
In a sub-sub-plot Dee’s presence and contribution to the learnèd discussions vexes some of the scientists from He. Blish has to explain that this is because it was only within living memory that He’s womenfolk were raised from the status of naked animals, a feminist liberation largely carried out by Dee herself. Now her mere presence irritates them and so, reluctantly, Amalfi orders Dee, Webster and Estelle in a spaceship back to New Earth.
But while the physicists are discussing how and why the universe is about to end and the kids are playing truth or dare, good old power politics erupts when the leader of a religious cult – the Warriors of God led by Jorn the Apostle – rises up and storms New Earth, seizing Mark Hazelton. Not only that, but we learn that in doing so, they seized the spaceship carrying Dee and the kids.
Amalfi uses one of Carrel’s little ‘proxies’ or remote control rocket ships to fly back to New Earth, landing in the now abandoned and empty Central Park and reactivating the old City Father’s namely the city’s ancient supercomputers. Using these he makes contact via a Dirac communication machine, with Jorn the Apostle. This man, wizened and canny, turns out to be more than a match for John Amalfi. Amalfi tries to bluff Jorn – in the way he has manipulated and bluffed so many antagonists in the earlier stories. This time he tells the leader of the fundamentalist army that New Earth is packed with believers in a lay philosophy named Stochasticism. Jorn doesn’t really believe him and, while Blish spends several pages mapping out Amalfi’s tortuous plan to outbluff the Apostle, the kind of convoluted semi-cunning plans we’ve got used to Amalfi spinning – when Jorn calls off his men and releases Dee and the kids.
Now time passes. Years pass. The New Earth scientists have all agreed the end is being precipitated by the winding down of the current universe and its interception or crash with a parallel universe of anti-matter. They have named the intersection of the two universes No Man’s Land. It was a casual suggestion of the child Estelle that they fire a bullet across No Man’s Land that set the scientists wondering whether they could make an anti-matter probe in this universe which could travel into the anti-matter universe.
Meanwhile Blish goes for pathos and human interest by glossing over the following few years during which Web and Estelle – the last human children to grow up – blossom and mature.
Our team send an anti-matter probe – very colourfully and cinematically described as a luminous sphere about six feet wide of neutrinos containing one grain of anti-matter – over to the other side. It reappears in the ancient control room of the city – which has been turned into a physics lab – with a burst of radiation which burns everyone, makes their hair fall out and gives mild radiation sickness – which they are advanced enough to be able to cure. The experiment shows that:
- someone else has sent a probe through and is conducting similar experiments
- it may be possible to survive the catastrophe but not in human form, maybe not with human consciousness
- the date of The End is precisely three years away, 2 June 4104
The main characters hold a valedictory meal at which Amalfi announces that he is going to travel on planet He as it heads towards the metagalactic centre, to which Mark announces that he wants to say on New Earth to put its affairs in order, Dee says she’ll stay with Mark, Jake the astronomer will also stay, but Estelle, Jake’s daughter, and Web, Mark and Dee’s grandson, announce that they want to accompany Amalfi on He.
The book contains complex emotional relationship elements which I struggled to give a damn about. Earlier we had learned that Mark and Dee’s marriage is hollow: he is too busy working and ignores her. She has taken a succession of waif and stray women into the household, I didn’t quite understand whether these were supposed to have been lesbian affairs. When they went to He together Amalfi declared her love for Dee and she told him all this, but refused to leave Mark. Now on this final evening on New Earth, Amalfi takes Dee for a walk and they have a lover’s quarrel, not least because Dee spots that Amalfi is in love with Estelle, who must be nearly a thousand years younger than him!
They agree to meet up in New York’s old control tower and ask the City Fathers. The City Fathers advices Mark and Dee, and Web and Estelle, and Amalfi to all go on with He to the metagalactic centre. But surprise the humans by saying that they, the City Fathers, should be taken too.
Somehow, not very logically but by narrative sleight of hand, Blish persuades us that it is vital that He get to the Metagalactic centre before the ‘opposition’, the rivals who had also sent a probe through into the anti-matter universe… do something, or win something, though that something is left vague. These rivals are named the Web of Hercules, although what that means is also left very vague.
The metagalaxy is described as the centre of the original Big Bang which brought the universe into being. Now planet He is hurtling towards it. The physicists speculate that, by being there at a place of stasis within a dynamic universe there might, just might, be some equivalent in the anti-universe, and might be some possibility of outliving the coming destruction.
The situation as we see it is this: Anything that survives the Ginnangu-Gap [the name they’ve given the annihilation of the universe] at the metagalactic centre, by as much as five micro-seconds, carries an energy potential into the future which will have a considerable influence on the re-formation of the two universes. If the surviving object is only a stone – or a planet, like He – then the two universes will re-form exactly as they did after the explosion of the monobloc, and their histories will repeat themselves very closely. If, on the other hand, the surviving object has volition and a little manoeuvrability – such as a man – it has available to it any of the infinitely many different sets of dimensions of Hilbert space. Each one of us that makes that crossing may in a few micro-seconds start a universe of his own, with a fate wholly unpredictable from history.’ (p.591)
First of all planet He arrives at the dead centre of the universe as indicated by the cessation of all external signals and information. All the controls in the control room on the peak of He’s highest planet go into overdrive and are cut off. Amalfi is consulting the City Fathers on what to do next, when the entire planet comes under attack from the Web of Hercules. So far as I understood it, they use tendrils of anti-matter to deliver fatal doses of radiation sent from control machines as much as a light year away.
In a twist, Miramon, leader of He, announces a physics-chemistry weapon they possess but hadn’t mentioned which eats away at these rays. They unleash it and watch the corrosive poison creep back up along the rays, eliminating them, presumably as far back as the control rooms, presumably eliminating the Web of Hercules.
It is is difficult to follow the hard science explanations but I think the Web of Hercules appeared, and was dealt with, in just a couple of pages. Hazleton announces that all the main characters have received fatal doses of radiation and have only a few weeks to live, but he and Amalfi bitterly joke that it’s alright – the universe itself is set to expire in ten days, and counting…
The final chapter is just four pages long and describes the end of the universe which is very simple. They go through the instructions one last time and climb into spacesuits. When the moment of annihilation of the present universe comes, the spindizzies will operate at peak performance for a few micro-seconds during which the half dozen of them, here at the core, the centre of the annihilating universe – Mark, Dee, Estelle, Web, Miramon and Amalfi – will have a split second to create new universes. The clock ticks down. The City Fathers say goodbye. The end comes instantly and completely. Amalfi is aware of the others and their human emotions. But he has lived long enough, seen the universe of human suffering, he wants to try something else.
What would happen if he just touches the detonator button on his spacesuit, blows himself up, and lets all the elements of which he and the suit are composed flash into the plasma which will form the basis of a new universe?
He touched the button over his heart.
Creation began. (p.610)
Quite a mind-blowing end.
Related links
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1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s
Books & Boots 