ames Blish (1921-1975) was a writer of many talents: An erudite critic, a composer of both sprawling space operas and elegant miniature delights, a scholar of the works of James Joyce and James Branch Cabell, a connoisseur of classical music and also paradoxically the first person to create Star Trek tie-in books, Blish died too young. But he left behind a large legacy, some of which is profiled in this new collection.
To open, we get a very early story, "Citadel of Thought," from 1940. The teenage Blish tells with juvenile brio the tale of space pirate Dan Lothar, whose damaged craft falls into Neptune's atmosphere only to be rescued by a strange cult of superhumans, who enlist Lothar in their upcoming battle against an intergalactic menace. And, of course, boy wins girl at the end—even if she is over two centuries old. "Get Out of My Sky" is the saga of two worlds that orbit closely around each other and their common star. Between the two different humanoid races on each planet there seems to stretch an unbreachable gulf of bad feelings and ignorance. Until one man, Aidregh, the leader of the world called Home, agrees to submit himself to the strange mental discipline practiced by the men of Rathe.
Gordon Arpe thinks he's invented the perfect hyperdrive that will open the stars to mankind. But on its trial run—with a craft full of civilian passengers—Arpe discovers that his drive possesses one small flaw. Using it shrinks ship and company down to microscopic size! "A Work of Art" follows the career of the famous composer Richard Strauss—in the year 2161. Strauss, or a simulacrum thereof, has been resurrected to provide artistic thrills for new audiences. But the revenant composer knows a secret even the superscience of the period can't discern. In the ruins of a nuclear-war-ravaged globe, doctors are at a premium. But what if one particular doctor began practicing a strange version of the Hippocratic code? This is the quandry explored in "The Oath."
"A Dusk of Idols" concerns another doctor, this time a wealthy, snobbish physician who takes it into his head to do some charity work among poor ignorant aliens. But the secrets concealed beneath the surface of the alien world prove all the doctor's placid assumptions meaningless. In "How Beautiful With Banners," a young woman wearing a biologically based spacesuit falls afoul of the natives of Titan in a manner no one could have foreseen. Journey through the mind of a delusionary man dreaming of apocalypses both global and personal in "Testament of Andros."
A second experimental hyperdrive leads to even weirder results in "Common Time," which brings astronaut Garrard up against the creatures known as the "clinesterton beademungen." "Pantropy" is the practice of altering humanity to fit different environments: yet how much more radically could humans be altered than in "Surface Tension," where the race is rendered microscopic and made to live in a puddle fraught with dangers? Finally, one of Blish's poems, "Scenario: The Edifice," rounds out this volume.
Too smart and too good to be popular?
James Blish was never a best-selling SF writer during his lifetime, nor exceedingly famous. He did win a Hugo for his novel A Case of Conscience (1958), a book recently reissued; and his grandest project, the quartet of star-spanning novels known as Cities in Flight (1970), has also gone through a number of posthumous editions. But despite lack of worldly success, he was a writer cherished by the cognoscenti for the depth of his intelligence, the fineness of his prose, the maturity of his worldview, the dedication to SF he exhibited and the brilliance of his criticism, collected volumes of which are still available. All in all, he offered a unique slant on SF that no one since his death has quite been able to replicate.
This new assortment is a good starting place to get acquainted with Blish and his work, but it's hardly a full sampler. Excellent stories such as "Beep" are missing, and although the juvenile "Citadel of Thought" is fun, in a Doc Smith fashion, it's not essential. But beggars can't be choosers, and with so much of Blish out of print, we have to be grateful for anything. Really, though, interested parties should scour the Internet for his other titles.
Blish had a way of prefiguring in prototype fashion what later writers would perfect. The dual-world dynamic established in "Get Out of My Sky" would later be burnished by Ursula Le Guin in The Dispossessed (1974). The living spacesuit and its fey inhabitant from "How Beautiful With Banners" reads like a foray into John Varley or Stephen Baxter territory. The scrupulous pushing of physics to its limits in "Nor Iron Bars" reminds me of Poul Anderson's Tau Zero (1970). And "Testament of Andros" could almost be a Ballardian tale of a sick mind dragging the world down with it. Without Blish pioneering the way, these other writers would have had a harder time breaking virgin soil.
But Blish was also learned in the lessons of his predecessors. "A Dusk of Idols" is reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith or Lovecraft in its creepy underground scenes. "Surface Tension" harks back to the Stapledonian long view of man's evolution. And "Common Time" has a certain van Vogt quality to its plot and effects.
What made Blish his own man were certain traits such as a frankness about sex (consider the scene in "The Oath" when a long-celibate visitor has to endure the company of a lucky man and his beautiful wife); a wryness verging on cynicism (the dying thoughts of Richard Strauss qualify as exceedingly bleak, as does the fate of the Titan explorer in "Banners"); a fidelity to scientific principles (the ecology of the world-puddle in "Surface Tension" is impeccable); and a mystical longing for higher planes of existence (Damon Knight thought "Common Time" so psychologically and spiritually rich that he devoted a whole essay to it).
James Blish was the model of a caring, exacting SF writer, and his accomplishments are fairly well served by this volume.
