Cities In Flight: They Shall Have Stars; A Life For The Stars; Earthman Come Home; The Triumph Of Time

Author: James Blish

If space opera is the literature of breathtaking special effects, then how about this: an entire city ripped out of the earth and setting out on a journey through space? Well that's exactly the scenario that you find in James Blish's wonderful quartet collectively titled Cities in Flight. It begins with two amazing discoveries: an anti-aging drug, so that anyone setting out on the long journeys to other worlds will still be alive at the end; and the spindizzy, a phenomenal anti-gravity device that will lift entire cities and send them through space. And that's exactly what happens when the Earth's economy collapses and major cities set off to seek work elsewhere in the galaxy. The four novels, They Shall Have Stars, A Life for the Stars, Earthman, Come Home and The Triumph of Time tell the stories of the "Okies" (named after the refugees from the Oklahoma dustbowl of the 1930s) over thousands of years. It's easy just to invent something that's bigger or faster than anyone else has done before, but that's not really very satisfying. Space opera works best when there is genuine innovation, and an intelligent purpose in the invention. And that was what Blish was a master at doing, and in our new austerity world these stories remain extraordinarily pertinent.