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A review by borisignatievich
Cities in Flight by James Blish, Betty Ballantine, R.D. Mullen
3.0
This was fun, but a bit hit and miss. The second and third books which tell the rise and fall of space travelling 'Okie' cities were really good fun, just the right balance of world building where you know the culture and focus on the characters operating in that space so it never feels dry like some worlds can. Slightly spoilery bit about the end of the third book, Earthman, Come Home - I think they way he introduced the myth of the Vegan orbital fort was excellent, in that it was mentioned just enough for me to have that "oh, it might be that fort thing" moment when reading about the March on Earth.
These two books excel at taking you into a strange culture and having you believe that world (or galaxy, since Blish doesn't fuck about with small scale here!)
The first book is essentially a prologue, focussing on the decline of Western culture and how it made the necessary science developments to transition into this Okie culture, and I really didn't enjoy it. To m, it was everything bad about the pulp era sci fi I thought. The final book, Triumph of Time, deals with the inevitable end of the universe. It was OK, but nowhere near as good as the middle two. It fell back into the intense technobabble of the first book (tbf, I have no idea what the state of physics was in the early 50s so it could have been very well researched, but I don't read sci-fi to read vague metaphysical descriptions using scientific terminology of concepts that can be summed up in a paragraph of normal english - it bores me) and I think mostly why I liked it more was the fact I could relate to the characters a bit from earlier stories.
Overall, worth checking out if you like sci-fi, but you won't miss much if you only get Earthman Come Home and possibly A Life For The Stars while ignoring the other two.
6.5/10
These two books excel at taking you into a strange culture and having you believe that world (or galaxy, since Blish doesn't fuck about with small scale here!)
The first book is essentially a prologue, focussing on the decline of Western culture and how it made the necessary science developments to transition into this Okie culture, and I really didn't enjoy it. To m, it was everything bad about the pulp era sci fi I thought. The final book, Triumph of Time, deals with the inevitable end of the universe. It was OK, but nowhere near as good as the middle two. It fell back into the intense technobabble of the first book (tbf, I have no idea what the state of physics was in the early 50s so it could have been very well researched, but I don't read sci-fi to read vague metaphysical descriptions using scientific terminology of concepts that can be summed up in a paragraph of normal english - it bores me) and I think mostly why I liked it more was the fact I could relate to the characters a bit from earlier stories.
Overall, worth checking out if you like sci-fi, but you won't miss much if you only get Earthman Come Home and possibly A Life For The Stars while ignoring the other two.
6.5/10