‘We’, said the golden giant, ‘are the Margraf Hazca, Vice Regent of the Duchy of Gort under his Eternal Eminence, Arpad Hrunta, Emperor of Space.’ (p.269)

Reading space opera like this means accepting the absurd, the grandiose and the preposterous. At moments Earthman, Come Home teeters on the edge of Terry Gilliam absurdity or Douglas Adams-style pastiche. But I found it very enjoyable, with a fast-moving plot of adventure and excitement, accompanied by a steady flow of discoveries or revelations about galactic adventurers 1,000 years in the future, which jolt and tickle the imagination.

James Blish (1921-75)

Blish was born in 1921 in New Jersey, and while at school published a science fiction fanzine. His first published story was in a pulp sci-fi magazine in 1940. His first successful stories were only published after the war, and it wasn’t till 1950 that he hit his stride with the first of the stories which was to develop into the ‘Okie’ series, describing entire cities which used ‘spindizzy’ technology to launch themselves and travel into space.

The first two stories, ‘Okie’, and ‘Bindlestiff’, were published in 1950, by Astounding Science Fiction magazine. ‘Sargasso of Lost Cities’ appeared in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books in April 1953. ‘Earthman, Come Home’ followed a few months later, also published by Astounding. In 1955, Blish collected these four short stories into an omnibus ‘novel’ titled Earthman, Come Home.

More stories followed, namely ‘Bridge’ and ‘At Death’s End’ which tell how the spindizzies were developed and the early era of space exploration. In 1956 these two were published together in the volume titled They Shall Have Stars. In 1958 Blish released a third ‘Okie’ novel, The Triumph of Time. Four years later, he returned to the subject for the last ‘Okie’ novel, A Life for the Stars.

The sequence of four Okie novels was edited together into an omnibus edition, titled Cities In Flight, which was first published in October 1970. This version was then republished as part of Orion’s large-format, yellow-spined SF Masterworks series in 1999, and this is the version I borrowed from my local library.

Are these stories literature? No way. A glance at the cover of the 1953 Two Complete Science-Adventure Books which featured ‘Sargasso of Lost Cities’ tells you everything you need to know about the cultural level of its first publishers and readers. Pulp, with scantily clad young women threatened by purple-skinned aliens is about the level. (As far as I can tell, nothing like that scene with a woman in a red bra takes place in any of the stories: the ‘Jungle’ chapter based on the Sargasso story contains nothing like it.)

Which order to read them in?

Before you start reading there’s a snag: the Cities in Flight omnibus volume doesn’t present the stories in the publishing order outlined above, but according to the order of their internal chronology, namely:

• They Shall Have Stars
• A Life For The Stars
• Earthman, Come Home
• The Triumph of Time

So, should you read them in the order published, or in the chronological order of the narrative? Well, in his introduction, Adam Roberts says the first-written stories remain the most thrilling and visionary, so he recommends you do not read the novels in the order they’re arranged in the omnibus edition, but start with Earthman, Come Home, the freshest and most exciting tales. Alright.

Earthman, Come Home

It is about the year 4,000 AD, and two key inventions have transformed the human race.

1. The first is anti-agathic drugs which enable humans to live more or less forever. The central figure of Earthman, Come Home, John Amalfi, is nearly 1,000 years old, and as young and virile and clear-headed as ever.

He was now about nine hundred years old, give or take fifty, ; strong as an ox, mentally alert and active, in good hormone balance, all twenty-eight sense sharp, his own special psi faculty – orientation – still as infallible as ever, and all in all as sane as a peripatetic starman could be. (p.325)

2. The second invention was ‘the Dillon-Wagoner Graviton Polarity Generator’, known colloquially as the spindizzy, an anti-gravity device. Because these project a protective field around anything using them, it was realised a) that things which went up through the earth’s atmosphere (or any planet’s atmosphere) needn’t be streamlined like traditional spaceships, but could be any shape, b) could be any size, as long as they had enough spindizzies to propel them.

In an earlier wave of colonisation immediately after their invention, set off to colonise other planets. Now, 1,000 years later, entire earth cities have abandoned the mother planet and ‘gone aloft’, journeying through space protected by hermetically sealed atmospheres, supplied by self-contained water and food systems. New York, we are told, was among the last to leave, in around 3111 AD.

These city-spaceships wander the settled galaxy looking for ‘trade’ i.e. looking for planets which need their particular skill sets. There are hundreds of wandering cities, each one specialising in particular areas. They’ve acquired the nickname ‘Okies’, copied from the impoverished farmers from Dustbowl Oklahoma who headed west to California looking for work in the 1930s. At last count there were some 18,000 Okie cities (p.350)

However, there are hazards. Not, surprisingly enough, from aliens because – just as in the contemporaneous Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov – it turns out that there are hardly any ‘alien’ life forms anywhere in the galaxy. (This is worth meditating on for a moment: in both the Foundation and Okie series there are no aliens. Despite the covers of Astounding Science Fiction always featuring giant insect or octopus monsters, nothing like that appears in the stories. The threat in both series always and only comes from other humans.)

So the threats are entirely human, and come from a) ‘bindlestiffs’ or Okie cities who have gone bad, gone rogue, become predators and murderers, or b) from the cops, Earth police who still, apparently, hold sway, even out on the edges of the galaxy and dislike or even hate Okie cities for their frequent rule breaking.

So this is the background and setting for a series of adventures featuring New York, more accurately the island of Manhattan, which can magically fly through space and land on any planet it fancies. The idea is wonderful, and Blish’s realisation of it is astonishingly convincing: the basic technique is ‘less is more’. New York City landmarks are sparingly referred to, the technology only fleetingly mentioned and, most conspicuously of all, there are hardly any characters. A quick Google search shows that the population of New York in 1950 was about eight million, but only a handful of characters ever appear in the stories – I counted about eight in all. Where are the teeming bustling millions of the actual New York? And how do any of them make a living drifting through space for months and years between planetfalls? The answer to these conundrums is – not to ask them.

Lead character is John Amalfi, the city’s mayor – tall, stocky (he has a barrel-shaped body), bald, it is he who takes the chances, assesses the odds and comes up with canny plans of action when the city gets into tight scrapes. Amalfi is advised Mark Hazleton, the city’s manager and trusted side-kick, who makes all the technical calculations but, more importantly, comes up with cunning plans.

Amalfi often refers to, or rings up and talks to, the City Fathers. It’s only in about the third story that we realise ‘the City Fathers’ are in fact a super-wise computerised database which Amalfi can consult whenever he wants to, but can occasionally turn off when he wants to override their Spock-like, logical advice in order to take another of his wild risks.

1. Utopia

New York, or just ‘the city’, arrives at a star system dominated by two warring planets, Utopia which is continually under attack from the brutish Hruntans. Amalfi lands on Utopia, Hazleton returns from a recce with a pretty native woman, Dee (who will end up accompanying them on all their subsequent adventures) and the rest of his team are drilling for oil and minerals when the Hruntans attack the planet. the plot is complicated (as the plots of all the stories will turn out to be) by the presence of the Earth police, the cops, who are just raring to catch an Okie city for the slightest technical violation of either a) space law or b) breaching its contract with a planet.

In this instance the earth cops have arrived to pacify the system which means crushing the Hruntan military. In a complex piece of Machiavellian manoeuvring, Amalfi orders the city aloft, leaving Mark and Dee back on Utopia, with a view to sucking up to the Hruntans.

2. Gort (the Duchy of Gort)

A Hruntan delegation arrives on the bridge, led by the thuggish Margraf Hazca. He informs them that other landing parties have landed at key locations around the city. Amalfi makes a deal to trade Hruntan resources (particularly oil) for the city’s knowledge of friction-field technology – although the Margraf thinly threatens that they plan to take the city’s technical know-how by force, anyway.

Blish the narrator takes the opportunity of explaining that:

‘The spindizzy or Okie cities are like bees, wandering around the galaxy of earth-colonised planets (the ‘pollinating bees of the galaxy’ p.345), spreading knowledge, new technology, minerals and resources. The earth police look down on them, and try to bust them if they break trading contracts with planets, but at the end of the day the Okies perform a useful service.’

Amalfi lays out a complex and not totally comprehensible plan: Mark will lecture the Hruntans’ leading scientists and military strategists on the cutting edge tech the city possesses and the Hruntans – way out here on the edge of the galaxy – don’t.

Amalfi assumes there’ll be one or two scientists who genuinely understand the city’s advanced tech. He assumes that, within any group of such scientists, there’s always jealousy, even unto assassination. He assumes that if the Okies favour one particular scientist, they will create dissension and jealousy among the Hruntan scientists. And this indeed does seem to occur, with a certain Dr Schloss a) understanding the city’s tech and, in short order b) being threatened by his peers.

(None of this makes much sense, but then a lot of the plot doesn’t really make much sense: entering the text is like entering another world where normal motivations, human psychology or behaviour have been twisted out of recognition.)

What happens next is even more bewilderingly weird: Amalfi has gone to the penthouse suite of the city’s tallest building which has been commandeered by the thuggish Margraf Hazca and his entourage. Amalfi is having a difficult conversation with him and the Margraf is just raising his blaster to threaten him, when Mark and his assistants turn on a ‘friction-field generator’, and turn it up to overdrive. Normally the machine works to create friction-free movement of surfaces, thus eliminating the need for oil in machines; in overdrive it does the reverse and makes ‘creates adherence between all surfaces’ (p.286).

I’m not sure that explains what happens now, which is that all the Hruntans in the penthouse are stuck to their chairs and seats, unable to move. For some reason Amalfi, standing, can move, runs to the lift but finds it stuck to its shaft walls, so runs back through the penthouse (past the furious Hruntans struggling to lift their arms from the chairs they’re stuck to), onto a ledge, and then – grips the side of the building (extra adhesion) and slides the 80 storeys back to the ground, which he hits with quite a bang.

When he recovers consciousness Dee is laving Amalfi’s blistered hands and forehead, while Mark explains that he had hidden good old Dr Schloss (the Hruntan scientist whose colleagues turned on him for being too clever) in the knackered old ‘invisibility’ machine which they’d been sold by inhabitants of the planet Lyra ages ago and had never got to work. (‘You remember that old Lyran invisibility machine, boss.’)

Well, clever old Dr Schloss got it to work, the entire city was made invisible for thirty minutes, and this was enough for it to beam aloft and escape the security net which was just being cast around the planet by the earth police.

Now they’re flying free, but Amalfi worries that the cops can now bust them for, technically, breaking a treaty they signed with the Hruntans. Therefore he instructs Mark to steer the city towards the Rift. Not the Rift!

3. The Rift

The Rift is ‘awesome beyond all human experience’, it is ‘a valley cut in the face of the galaxy’, a vast space devoid of stars. Amalfi is not sure any city has ever successfully crossed it from one side to the other, but he’s going to try. Amalfi has barely explained all this to Dee, than they see a flaring in space (Amalfi uses a big video screen to steer the city by) and hear over the radio screaming pleas of SOS.

A city has been attacked and destroyed by a bindlestiff. What is a bindlestiff? An Okie city that’s gone pirate. Where will the lifeships from the destroyed city go? Well, there’s only one freak star out here in the emptiness of the Rift, so Amalfi sets a course for it.

Obviously and inevitably the star turns out to have a planet circling it which is capable of human life (as they pretty much all are: earth gravity; earth air; all very convenient). As the city comes in to land on the planet they are surprised to pick up chanting on the radio: it is inhabited.

After the huge city has dropped onto the surface (rather roughly, since a recurring theme is that the 23rd Street spindizzy is playing up), they discover a primitive tribal-level civilisation.

As Amalfi and the others exit the city onto the plain they are surprised to see a great procession of locals dressed in gowns and head-dresses and what-have-you snaking out from the nearest settlement and approaching them with singing and signs of reverence. After a cohort of children, come men in symbolic dress, and then a huge cage full of naked, filthy, unwashed women (!), drawn by two giant lizards (!!) Do they have to be naked?

Most of [the Hevian women] had been stoned for inadvertently covering themselves at one time or another, for in Hevian society women were not people but reminders of damnation, doubly evil for the slightest taint of secretiveness. (p.328)

Attendants unshackle the lizards and lead them away, leaving Amalfi face to face with a cage full of naked women, and a tall impressive man comes forward and places in Amalfi’s hand… ‘an ornate wrought-metal key’!

4. He (the planet He)

Miramon is spokesman for the local people, and tellus Amalfi the planet is named He. It seems they had a very advanced civilisation until some kind of catastrophe 8,000 years earlier. Amalfi suspects he knows why (the key feature of this book is that Amalfi knows everything and is nearly always right; it is very comforting and reassuring to be on Amalfi’s side in all these conflicts and emergencies, since he always emerges unharmed and vindicated, and saves the city yet again.)

He has a Draysonian cycle i.e. every so often it abruptly changes the axis of its rotation. Amalfi guesses that’s what happened 8,000 years ago, destroying the old civilisation and turning the entire planet into a steamy tropical jungle. Miramon explains that a new religion arose and it is now universally believed that the inhabitants of He are in a steamy tropical hell because of their sins – the kind of standard, shallow, bubble-gum religion you get in all these space operas, which lingers on into Star Trek or Star Wars.

Meanwhile Amalfi’s techs have discovered that a lifeship from the attacked city landed in another settlement, one of the rebel settlements which have broken with He‘s orthodox religion.

Having made friendly relations with Miramon and his people, Amalfi is able to cadge a rocket ship off him and get it piloted to this other settlement, because although He suffered a collapse of advanced civilisation, some elements of hi tech survived. For example, they have automobiles, which Blish enjoys using in a comic scene where Amalfi and Hazleton are driven in one to meet the settlement’s head men, disbelieving the noise and smell and discomfort of a car, as compared with the city’s own smooth, friction-free computer-driven cabs.

In an exciting scene, the little local rocketship they’re flying in comes under sustained attack from the enemy settlement, with bullets and bits of shrapnel shredding its thin metal skin, nearly hitting Amalfi et al. An attack squad suppresses the locals then locates the prison where the survivors of the destroyed Okie city’s lifeship were being tortured to reveal their tech secrets. One begs to be killed, two have gone mad, one has had his tongue torn out.

The motive for saving these guys was that, in their brief distress call, the Okie city had claimed to have a fuel-free drive, something which would be worth a fortune to New York or anyone. But Amalfi has barely begun questioning the tongueless man (who has, in the magic way of these books, somehow learned a way of speaking without a tongue) before the top of his (tongueless man’s) head is blown off by a bullet.

Back at the city, they come under dynamite and gas attack. Amalfi realises that the bindlestiff – which they had thought had disappeared into deep space – has in fact landed on the planet and is aiding the rebels. In a modern movie-type scenario the entire vast city turns out to have buried itself deep in a muddy quagmire near the leading town of the rebels, which is called Fabre-Suith.

Two things happen to make this story fast-moving and almost incomprehensible.

1. While the attack is still on (by now we have grasped that the Fabre-Suith people are attacking the city, but with weapons given them by the bindlestiff) Amalfi orders Mark to take the wild naked native women (who we saw in an earlier scene being taken to a kind of underground bathing rooms and hosed down by Dee, who joined in!) now cleaned and washed and dressed, to a clearing in the jungle near where all the weapons are being fired at the city. I couldn’t quite believe this was meant to be a serious plotline, but what happens is that the native men leave off firing weapons at the city and rush towards this clearing full of nubile young women, where they start fighting among themselves for the women. Not only that, but the bindlestiff ship emerges from its muddy hiding place, and itself sends a party of men to grab the women. The two groups of men start fighting. Eventually the bindlestiff sends a missile which annihilates the nearest settlement (in, I think, a mushroom-cloud atomic explosion) and their men make off with the women prisoners.

But all this is a distraction from Plan Two which is that, without anything having been explicitly agreed between Amalfi and Miramon, Amalfi has taken it upon himself to correct the axis of spin of the planet. This involves quite a lot of cod engineering with 40-mile wide tunnels being bored right to the core of the planet and spindizzy technology inserted. You’d expect this to take weeks, maybe months or even years to accomplish, but for the purposes of the pulp plot it all seems to be done in a day or so.

Then, just as the bindlestiff is pulling free of the vast mud swamp it had hidden in and about to pose maximum threat to New York, Amalfi presses the button to activate the deep planet drivers: Moving Day has begun; the engines buried near He‘s core kick off.

In fact it turns out be wildly more effective than Amalfi had anticipated. The vast engines they’ve buried near the planet’s core don’t slightly adjust the planet’s spin, they blast the whole thing clean out of orbiting its star. Within moments He‘s star has flashed by Amalfi’s viewing screen, and the planet is coursing through the Rift at light speed. The bindlestiff was thrown clear by the blast but New York is still attached to He.

Amalfi asks Mark to find the planet’s old star (it is part of these stories’ charm that Mark does so using a slide rule. In a similarly sweet and naive way, Amalfi guides this vast flying city using… a master space stick..’ by hand… by touch and feel, while staring at the big screen in front of him.)

By the time Mark’s done that the planet He is leaving the galaxy, departing upwards from the dish-shaped galaxy, far too far to return to its host sun, and it will take thousands of years, even at light speed, to reach the next galaxy. ‘What shall we do, boss?’ (Mark always calls Amalfi ‘boss’.)

In the kind of grand, sweeping and insouciant gesture which we’re getting used to by now, Amalfi points out that the spindizzy field which is driving He will also protect it from space cold, and supply it with heat; that by the time they reach the next galaxy they should have figured out the technology required to slow the planet down and locate it in a star orbit. Yeah, He will be alright. So they can leave.

So he orders Mark to take the city ‘aloft’, leaving He to its fate, and heading back into our galaxy. Now, it has been a recurrent theme that one of the city’s spindizzy engines, the one sited at 23rd Street, is always malfunctioning. They skip off He and and their next priority is to look for a repair or ‘garage’ planet.

5. Murphy (the planet Murphy)

Mark and/or the City Fathers tell Amalfi that they are re-entering the galaxy in the zone run by the Acolytes. They identify a sun and an engineering and repair planet but are still only approaching it when they are pulled over by cops. But these are swaggering, edge-of-the-galaxy, provincial cops, Acolyte cops (I think the analogy might be with the swaggering bully stereotype of the Deep South American cop).

Amalfi gives their bully boy leader (‘Lieutenant Lerner, Forty-fifth Border Security Group’, p.347) a five hundred Oc dollar bribe to let them pass on to the repair planet (incongruously named Murphy).

As they approach they realise that parallel to the main sun (in fact a pair of circulating stars) is a red dwarf sun and that around this feeble heart source has clustered some 300 Okie cities. It is an Okie ‘jungle’.

They touch down on Murphy which they discover to be very discouraging. The vast bays designed to take Okie cities for repairs are empty. The equipment is rusting. It is almost abandoned. An engineer comes running and Blish blinds us with pseudo-science about what needs repairing, but then a little later he returns waving a blaster around. Once they’ve calmed him down, Amalfi and Hazleton are shocked to discover that their money is worthless.

All through the story up to now Amalfi and co have used the rare metal germanium as the basis for their deals, drilling it out of planets where they could (along with oil) in return for their technological know-how. Now, the engineer informs them, germanium has ceased to be currency. A great economic collapse has swept out from earth and the new currency is drugs, specifically the anti-agathic drugs which keeps them all alive. New York’s treasury is worthless overnight.

Amalfi’s techies had been examining the only other city in the garage, an apparently all-purpose city with several functioning spindizzies. Amalfi orders his teams to cannibalise them.

At which point they hear sirens of police spaceships closing in, ready to arrest them not only for their long list of violations but for bribing Lieutenant Lerner with money which, they now know, was worthless. So Amalfi presses the ‘Get out of here fast’ emergency button.

6. The Jungle (i.e. the Sargasso sea of knackered Okie cities)

New York reappears among the ruined Okie cities clustered around the red dwarf star. He and Hazleton quickly realise that the cities are being forced to bid for work grudgingly offered out by bullying Acolyte officials. It’s like those scenes from 1940s and 50s movies where dockers turn up at the docks and the favoured ones get given work and the unlucky ones go home hungry.

Over the radio the Acolyte woman holds an auction for various mining and dirty jobs the Acolytes want them to so, in which the desperate cities undercut each other. the cop spaceships approach and foolishly some of the Okies open fire on them, only to be wiped out.

Avoiding this chaos, Amalfi goes over to the Okie city which has established rulership over these waifs. It is the city of Buda-Pesht and is run by a ‘King’. He it is who tries to enforce discipline among the cities and makes them all hold to minimum wages.

There now follows a scene which, in its byzantine complexity but childish psychology, is strongly reminiscent of Asimov’s Foundation stories. The King has a grand plan which is for the 300 or so Okie cities to band together and fly to earth to ask for justice (and food).

In a long scene, Amalfi recruits the German mayor of a minor city, and then proceeds to interrupt the meeting, speak from the floor, demand to be heard from the platform, goes up and engages in head to head rivalry with the King, making a powerful counter-proposal. This is that the Okies should pool the knowledge of their City Fathers to develop new levels of hyper-technology, which they can then sell as a cartel to the galaxy. Amalfi sways the meeting, many of whom are attracted by the idea, but at the crucial moment, when the King asks him where he is from, Amalfi refuses to say. Hazleton is there in the wings, with Dee, urging him to utter the words ‘New York’, because the city has such prestige that just the mention of its name would swing the meeting.

But here’s the Asimov-like twist. As he explains to Dee and Hazleton as they leave, he didn’t want to sway the meeting. The plan to link up all the City Fathers would never work. He just wanted to present a strong enough counter-plan… to ensure that the King’s plan triumphed. Aha. Amalfi wants the so-called March on Earth to take place, because he wants to hide New York in among it.

This is the last straw for Amalfi’s sidekick Hazleton, but there’s a final last straw when Amalfi goes on to admit that he also is in love with Dee. Hazleton explodes and says the fateful words: I want off. He wants to permanently leave the city. it is a legal form of words no mayor can ignore and no starman can retract. Amalfi accepts it at face value. Only later will it become clear that this, too, is part of his plan.

What happens next is Amalfi orders his new city manager to take New York to one of the outermost Okies which seems to be abandoned. They communicate politely as they walk through the dark and empty city but one person holds out in one floor of a deserted building, firing on them incessantly until reluctantly, Amalfi’s attack team take it out. They then dismantle the city’s spindizzies and take them back to New York.

On the big screen they see that the King’s rebellion has been reported to the earth police who appear out of hyperspace to corral the Okies. Some foolishly fight back, but surprisingly manage to take out cop ships. While the battle proceeds, most of the fit Okies abandon the area, heading off into space.

7. Hern VI (the planet Amalfi steers across the galaxy)

The majority of the Okie cities have set out on the March on Earth. Luckily New York is equipped with ‘proxies’, ten-metre-long ships with cameras attached, and Amalfi has these proxies tail the March across the galaxy.

Meanwhile Amalfi’s men use the spindizzies from the all-purpose ship and from the outermost Okie which they plundered to fit them to a planet – to Hern VI, a chunk of rock circling the sun. You’d think it would take a while to equip a planet to be driven through space but, as usual in these stories, it only takes a few pages covered in dialogue and some bogus science and the job is done. Hern VI blast off into space, in pursuit of the March Okies.

Despite being ridiculous beyond words this sequence is actually very exciting, as Amalfi steers an entire planet which is travelling faster than the speed of light across the galaxy in pursuit of the Okie Marchers.

As they whizz by any number of star systems and spaceships put out warnings about a rogue planet flying across the galaxy.

The career of Hern VI from its native Acolyte cluster across the centre of the galaxy made history. (p.412)

The aim is to catch up with the Marchers. To cut a long (and exciting) story short 1. The Marchers approach the earth solar system, slow down and adopt a battle formation. 2. After radio warnings, all kinds of earth battleships appear out of nothing and start attacking them, the King orders the Okies to fight back, mayhem. 3. But Amalfi has seen something other people have noticed but not realised the significance of, that an unusual spherical object had got in among the Okies and was now in the vanguard of their approach to earth. Then 4. everyone hears a peculiar radio message given out by the sphere, in English, but a strangely mangled English threatening the ‘People of Earth’.

Barely has this taken place than there is a profound crash, seismic tremors across Hern VI, the glimpse of a blue pearly earth has gone, the sight of Sol in the big video screen has gone, Hern VI has entered and exited the solar system in seconds.

And only now does Amalfi reveal his plan. He knew that the strange ellipsoidal metal object in among the Okie Marchers, and which then threatened earth, was none other than the legendary Vegan Battle Cruiser. The Vegans ruled the galaxy thousands of years before humanity came along. Beaten back by humanity’s advance, they had retreated to their heartlands, but then sent out this cruiser to take revenge. Marching with the Okie cities gave it perfect cover.

Amalfi had realised all this, had engineered the King and other Okies to march on earth, had engineered his teams stealing the spindizzies from the other cities, equipping Hern VI and making its hot pursuit of the Marchers, and he had engineered Hern VI’s collision with the Vegan spaceship. He had piloted Hern VI half way across the galaxy in order to collide with the Vegan battle cruiser which was instantly reduced to a pile of steaming metals in a deep crater on the planet’s leading edge.

Not only was this all a cunning plan but – when Dee suggests they tell earth how they saved the planet, Amalfi reveals that they can’t. If they reveal that they defeated the Vegan ship, the Vegans will build a new one. Not publicising the fact that they blatted it will leave the Vegans uncertain what’s happened to it. Earth’s security depends on them keeping their mouths shut.

Unfortunately every cop in the galaxy will now be after them for breaching earth’s security borders etc. Which is why they are steaming on towards an area of the galaxy know as the Megallanic clouds.

One last thing. the City Fathers have made it quite clear that the 23rd Street spindizzy has had it, but so have several of the others. So their next planet-fall will be their last. So that solves the dilemma of his best buddy, Hazleton, wanting off. He will get off. But so will everyone else. Once it’s docked, New York will never fly again.

8. IMT

The city lands on a new planet in the Magellanic Cloud. They have been given permission by the planet’s ‘Proctors’. They land on a particularly barren stretch of heathland and come across ‘chocolate-coloured’ illiterate serfs ploughing the land. They take one, Karst, under their wing, and go to the nearest city to meet the ‘Proctors’ who allowed them to land. 1. the handful of Proctors use the native inhabitants as slaves. 2. this city was clearly itself once an Okie, with spindizzy tech hidden in its bowels.

Now all through the previous stories had been references to an atrocity carried back in legendary days by a particularly brutal Okie city on a planet named Thor V, I’m not sure the details are given anywhere but the general idea is the Okies massacred every man, women and child, and that this is one of the bases for the very bad reputation the Okies have across the galaxy and why the cops hate them.

What emerges slowly in this story is that – again very like an Asimov Foundation story – Amalfi knows something which we and all the rest of the characters don’t. The ‘Proctors’ are the very same men who carried out the atrocity on Thor V. Amalfi slowly reveals this to Karst, who has been undergoing hynopedia education sessions.

Karst sings an old slave folk song to him which has a refrain that IMT / made the sky / Fall – which Amalfi realises is a folk memory of the way the IMT city crushes opposition by literally landing on them.

9. Home

At the climax of the story, and the series, Amalfi fools one of the Proctors, Heldon, into letting him examine the city’s spindizzies. The pretext is that New York will trade its own tech in exchange for being allowed to settle there. The ‘Proctors’ realise Amalfi is up to something and corner him in the machine room where he’d been examining the ways the spindizzies were connected. Amalfi holds up two eggs. Very simple: they are full of plague bacillus. Shoot him, he falls, the eggs shatter, the Proctors would be dead of plague before they reach the doors.

Cursing, they let him exit the door, which he locks behind him and scampers up the main Proctor building, the Temple, to its highest point. Up here must be the control room. He discovers a secret entrance to a kind of attic, and discovers the controls to the city and just has times to make some vital alterations to the controls, before going back down to the room below and once again using the egg threat to get free.

Amalfi walked backwards out of the star chamber and down two steps. Then he bent, deposited his remaining black egg carefully on the threshold, thumbed his nose at the furious soldiery, and took off down the spiral staircase at a dead run. (p.471)

Flash Gordon. The Prisoner of Zenda. Douglas Fairbanks Junior. Mesotron rifles are fired at him, demolishing entire buildings, as he zigzags through the streets of the IMT city, eventually making it to the scrubland at the perimeter, the area which is obviously where the city joins the land. All the while the noise had been building up, the sound of screeching metal and the streets had been bucking and writhing.

Amalfi is just scrambling across the no mans land when a line of light appears all round the city’s circumference. it is wriggling free of its location ready to fly over to new York and squash it. But Amalfi fiddled with the controls, remember. Suddenly, with no warning, the IMT city rises but doesn’t hover and then head for New York… it keeps on rising uncontrollably, up up up, Amalfi had disabled the steering mechansim and jammed the engines, it is doomed to fly directly upwards and in an endless straight line.

The freed slave Karst helps Amalfi to his feet and both stand on the edge of the vast hole the IMT city left behind it, and Amalfi (and Blish) have one more trick up their sleeve. As relations with the IMT had soured, the Proctors had called the earth police (them again! they appear in pretty much every story) and warned them that the wanted Okie city of New York was likely to make a getaway from this planet.

Now as Amalfi and Karst look up into the sky at the dwindling light of the IMT city – suddenly it flares into a great white light. The earth cops were there waiting, and have vapourised it.

Thus 1. justice has been served on the genocidairs of IMT. 2. the earth cops now think they have destroyed New York and its population are now free of the threat of arrest and execution. 3. With the yoke of IMT slavery removed from their necks, the native chocolate brown people of the planet are now free.

Thus New York’s great odyssey, and the entire sequence of stories comes to a fitting end, with John Amalfi (rather like the psychohistorian Seldon in Asimov’s Foundation series) vindicated at every turn for his vast wisdom and strategic guile. And love of justice. Now he and Dee and Hazleton and all the other inhabitants of New York will turn to cultivating this planet, and making it a new Earth.

Around them, there was a murmuring of voices, hushed with disaster, and with something else, too – something so old, and so new, that it hardly had a name on the planet that IMT had ruled. It was called freedom. (p.474)

Cover art

Interesting how the same story can be illustrated so many different ways – starting in the 1950s with the half-naked woman pulp magazine cover shown above, through to just twenty years later, which saw the advent of stunning sci-fi art, like the dazzling 1970s cover shown below.

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Related links

• Cities In Flight on Amazon
• Cities In Flight Wikipedia article
• James Blish Wikipedia article

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

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

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