Cities in Flight - James Blish

The ‘SF Masterworks’ series, by The Orion Publishing Group, covers some sixty plus years of science-fiction writing, boasting a collection of novels from authors such as Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, Frederik Pohl, Larry Niven, Alfred Bester and many, many others. ‘Cities In Flight’ is the third book of the series and was written by James Blish, who was born in 1921 and is probably best known for his novelisations of Star Trek scripts, also laying claim to having written the first original Star Trek novel, ‘Spock Must Die!’. ‘Cities In Flight’ was originally four separate, but intertwined, novels and short stories, which for this edition have been put ...

A Millennium SF Masterwork originally published in four volumes, here reprinted in the order in which they occur within Blish’s imagined history rather than the order in which they were published, Cities in Flight is one of the few novels I have read where I thought the high page-count (604 pages; I normally refuse to touch any novel over 500) was actually justified. The first section, “They Shall Have Stars”, is probably the weakest in the book (which I point out merely to indicate the very high standard of the others), and details the discovery of devices which will come to be known as ‘spindizzies’, in effect anti-gravity ...

Cities in flight. A life for the stars. A small review for a small book, well the author didn't have much to say and neither have I. Synopsis: When the work runs out, cities begin to simply lift off into space looking for their future. The main character in the story is Chris and one day whilst out spying on Scranton he is caught inside the spindizzy field as the city of Scranton begins its ascent into space. His old life gone forever. All must contribute on the now space city so he becomes an apprentice astronomer under the tutelage of Prof Boyle Warner. But he is no astronomer, so when scranton meets New York city he is ...