Cities in Flight by James Blish is in the SF Masterworks list, so clearly some "leading SF writers and editors" think it is a classic. I’m not sure I agree; it was a mostly enjoyable though somewhat uneven read but I’m not convinced it deserves classic status.
The series of four books is nowadays published as an omnibus in a single volume that spans some two thousand years of Human and Galactic history. However it was mainly written in the 50’s and was previously published as four separate novels and before that much of the material was originally published as short stories. On top of that the books were not written in chronological order the writing order was approximately III, I, IV, II. I felt that, partly due to this history, these books have some serious flaws:
Commentary on society: I think this is where these books are strongest. They present an interesting commentary on society, closely following Spengler’s theories on the cyclic nature of society. Unfortunately I think these theories and/or Blish’s interpretation of them are wrong. The societies presented are almost all dystopian in nature and I thought overly pessimistic. Also some of the fundamental near future ideas have already been shown as incorrect; Russian society did not subsume Western society, in fact pretty much the reverse has taken place. That is an understandable mistake considering the books were written whilst McCarthyism was rife. But that aside, fascinating though they were, I never felt that any of the societies presented were completely plausible.
Hard SF: these books are undoubtedly excellent early examples of hard SF. Unfortunately science has moved on a long way since the 50’s and that rather detracts from this aspect of the books; a thousand years into the future and they have computers that don’t quite make it to sentience but they are still using slide rules. Blish was aware of transistors at this time and clearly could see their importance (making germanium the basis for galactic currency) and yet a thousand years in the future they still have control circuits using vacuum tubes “as big as his fist”. All this tends to make the books feel more than a little dated. However the hard science would have been pretty impressive at the time of writing and the sheer scope of Blish’s vision is pretty breathtaking.
Plots: as best I can tell only books I and IV were actually written as books rather than cobbled together from short stories, which means that books II and III were really made up of lots of little plots. I found this made them somewhat disjointed and also that, and the odd order of writing, resulted in a lot of inconsistencies. In fairness Blish was aware of this:
Writing style: I frankly struggled at times with Blish’s style of writing, whilst I know they were written in the 50’s, I have read many other books from that period or older with less trouble in this regard. He frequently used idioms with which I am unfamiliar and struggled to make sense of. Some of his sentences were massively long and I found his punctuation sporadic; I frequently had to read a sentence three or four times before I could make sense of it.
Characters: there were relatively few characters in the books and those that there were I never really felt I got to know well. I did not feel that character building was one of Blish’s strengths in these books. Maybe that’s partly due to the disjointed nature of bolting together a lot of short stories. Certainly the first and last books which were written as single novels were better in this regard.
All in all I felt they were too uneven in too many ways to rate as a classic SF book.
[All that said they did inspire me to think about and write this commentary which is not something I usually do, so maybe that fact argues against me
]
The series of four books is nowadays published as an omnibus in a single volume that spans some two thousand years of Human and Galactic history. However it was mainly written in the 50’s and was previously published as four separate novels and before that much of the material was originally published as short stories. On top of that the books were not written in chronological order the writing order was approximately III, I, IV, II. I felt that, partly due to this history, these books have some serious flaws:
Commentary on society: I think this is where these books are strongest. They present an interesting commentary on society, closely following Spengler’s theories on the cyclic nature of society. Unfortunately I think these theories and/or Blish’s interpretation of them are wrong. The societies presented are almost all dystopian in nature and I thought overly pessimistic. Also some of the fundamental near future ideas have already been shown as incorrect; Russian society did not subsume Western society, in fact pretty much the reverse has taken place. That is an understandable mistake considering the books were written whilst McCarthyism was rife. But that aside, fascinating though they were, I never felt that any of the societies presented were completely plausible.
Hard SF: these books are undoubtedly excellent early examples of hard SF. Unfortunately science has moved on a long way since the 50’s and that rather detracts from this aspect of the books; a thousand years into the future and they have computers that don’t quite make it to sentience but they are still using slide rules. Blish was aware of transistors at this time and clearly could see their importance (making germanium the basis for galactic currency) and yet a thousand years in the future they still have control circuits using vacuum tubes “as big as his fist”. All this tends to make the books feel more than a little dated. However the hard science would have been pretty impressive at the time of writing and the sheer scope of Blish’s vision is pretty breathtaking.
Plots: as best I can tell only books I and IV were actually written as books rather than cobbled together from short stories, which means that books II and III were really made up of lots of little plots. I found this made them somewhat disjointed and also that, and the odd order of writing, resulted in a lot of inconsistencies. In fairness Blish was aware of this:
Writing style: I frankly struggled at times with Blish’s style of writing, whilst I know they were written in the 50’s, I have read many other books from that period or older with less trouble in this regard. He frequently used idioms with which I am unfamiliar and struggled to make sense of. Some of his sentences were massively long and I found his punctuation sporadic; I frequently had to read a sentence three or four times before I could make sense of it.
Characters: there were relatively few characters in the books and those that there were I never really felt I got to know well. I did not feel that character building was one of Blish’s strengths in these books. Maybe that’s partly due to the disjointed nature of bolting together a lot of short stories. Certainly the first and last books which were written as single novels were better in this regard.
All in all I felt they were too uneven in too many ways to rate as a classic SF book.
[All that said they did inspire me to think about and write this commentary which is not something I usually do, so maybe that fact argues against me
]
