Blish's _Cities in Flight_: inconsistencies etc.
Phillip Thorne
"Star Trek Readers", "Cities in Flight"'. It's no relation to the
dec-2001 rasfw thread "_Cities in Flight_ (was: _The Neutronium
Alchemist_)". I'm crossposting to rec.arts.sf.science in anticipation of
any tech that gets discussed. My first set of inconsistencies follow in a
reply to this message.)
There are seven stories in James Blish's (1921-1975) "Cities in Flight"
series. "Okie" through "Earthman, Come Home" were short stories collected
in 1953 in a single volume, also titled _Earthman, Come Home_. All four
novels were collected in a 1970 Doubleday omnibus edition, with an
Afterword (by Richard D. Mullen) exploring Blish's use of the Spenglerian
theory of history.
http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb-bin/exact_author.cgi?James_Blish
Title Date Story_ord Pub_ord
------------------------ ---- --------- -------
They Shall Have Stars 1957 1 5
A Life for the Stars 1962 2 7
Okie 1950 3 1
Bindlestiff 1950 4 2
Sargasso of Lost Cities 1952 5 3
Earthman, Come Home 1953 6 4
The Triumph of Time 1958 7 6
------------------------ ---- --------- -------
_They Shall Have Stars_ (1957) covers the six-year period in early 21cen
in which the spindizzy (FTL travel) and anti-agathics are first
discovered. The persistent cold war with the Soviets has eroded the
West's liberalism, and a visionary U.S. senator sees these two inventions
as an escape for the West's values, and launches one interstellar
expedition before he's arrested.
(Space is abandoned. During the subsequent 400 years of domination by the
Bureaucratic State, the spindizzy is rediscovered, and entire factories
are lofted into space to exploit the planets and asteroids. In 2289,
Earth's expanding empire meets the first wave of colonies; also the alien
VEGAN TYRANNY, which is defeated in a century-long war; but one ORBITAL
FORT escapes. In 2375, the first entire city leaves Earth, and founds a
culture of interstellar migrant worker-cities: "OKIES"; Earth's police
fleets track violators of the labor regulations. By 3111, New York is one
of the last cities to depart.)
Jump to 32cen in _A Life for the Stars_ (1962). While watching Scranton
prepare to depart, 16-year-old CRISPIN DEFORD is impressed by the city. A
year later, he's traded to the Okie NEW YORK, NEW YORK (led by Mayor JOHN
AMALFI), and begins his education to become a citizen (ie entitled to
anti-agathics). The city lands on a feudal planet that wishes to
industrialize, but DeFord scuttles the contract when he unnecessarily
tries to rescue two hostages. It's invited to a second planet to evict
Scranton, which has flubbed a mining contract and is squatting. DeFord's
flair for cultural morphology gets him appointed City Manager.
(c.3300, DeFord is shot for perpetrating a contract violation. The
sentence is pronounced by NYC's CITY FATHERS, the 134 200-ton computers
that run the city. He's replaced by MARK HAZLETON.)
In "Okie" (1950), NYC heads toward a system with two lost/fallen colonies:
UTOPIA was colonized by the HAMILTONIANS (c.2070), and GORT by a remnant
of the HRUNTAN EMPIRE founded 2464 by a human admiral during the Vegan
War. The Earth Police are intervening in their protracted war. Amalfi
barely navigates the political shoals, and NYC gains some new citizens and
a frictionless technology, MOLAR VALENCE.
(Subsequent violations in the next 200 years lead to pursuit by the
police.)
In "Bindlestiff", NYC takes refuge in THE RIFT, a starless void that'll
take 104 years to cross. Their outrider probes detect a distant attack by
one city (a BINDLESTIFF) on another, which claims to possess a fuelless
drive. NYC encounters a rogue star system with an inhabited planet, HE,
whose technic civilization fell due to a climatic change. The bindlestiff
city has grounded there. An operation to alter He's axis with spindizzies
launches the entire planet out of the galaxy.
Fifty years later (c.3900), in "Sargasso of Lost Cities" (1952), NYC
encounters an economic depression, and an entire "jungle" of Okies in one
system looking for work. Amalfi organizes a convoy to Earth.
The 75-year trip leads back to Earth in "Earthman, Come Home" (1953),
where NYC swats the long-lost Vegan Orbital Fort with a spindizzy-driven
asteroid; the Fort had taken advantage of the crowd to sneak up on its
1500-year enemy. Unfortunately, NYC can't reveal this, so looks like the
instigator, and so runs (with its excess velocity) for the Greater
Magellanic Cloud.
In _The Triumph of Time_ (1958), NYC discovers an Earthlike world in the
GMC, but has to dislodge the prior occupants -- the reviled rogue city
IMT. Everyone settles down and gets domestic (except Amalfi), until the
Hevians return, with the news that the universe is probably ending, and
can you help confirm this? They race for the METAGALACTIC CENTER, where
the most they can do is influence the creation of subsequent universes.
(The historical note at the front of TToT implies the universe was *not*
destroyed, but merely interrupted by the so-called GINNANGU-GAP. The
records of the WEB OF HERCULES, the "fourth great civilization of the
Milky Way" which was supplanting the humans at the time, somehow survived
the cataclysm.)
.- Phillip Thorne, RPI BS-CSCI 1998 ------------- It's the boundary -.
| tho...@underbase.org www, nsx.underbase.org conditions that |
| peth...@earthlink.net home.earthlink.net/~pethorne/ get you |
\_ The Non-Sequitur Express - SF-TV-Misc News P/Re/Views &c _________/
Phillip Thorne
some of them; nonetheless, I don't consider the books "great" because (a)
he squandered the settings; eg, New York's million people don't seem to
*do* anything during their transits, and (b) there are sloppy
inconsistencies between the books.
Here's my first set of objections; *I* can think of workarounds, but for
discussion's sake, I'll yet you-the-readers try.
(Contradictions are listed in chronology order, not publication order.
Page numbers refer to the 1970 Doubleday omnibus edition, with the
Afterword by Richard D. Mullen; the grey cover with a milkweed pod
spilling identical bald big-nosed faces. The four novels are abbreviated
TSHS, ALFts, ECH, and TToT.)
Title Date Story_ord Pub_ord
------------------------ ---- --------- -------
They Shall Have Stars 1957 1 5
A Life for the Stars 1962 2 7
Okie 1950 3 1
Bindlestiff 1950 4 2
Sargasso of Lost Cities 1952 5 3
Earthman, Come Home 1953 6 4
The Triumph of Time 1958 7 6
------------------------ ---- --------- -------
http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb-bin/exact_author.cgi?James_Blish
(1) In ALFtS, NYC's control room is in the spire of the Empire State
Building. BUT, in ECH(235), it's in the belfry of City Hall.
(2) In ALFtS, Scranton visits two stars (the one NYC points out, and the
one it squats on) in about two years (because DeFord ages from 16 to 18
during the novel). BUT, in ECH(238), NYC seems to take "many" years
between stars, even in non-rarefied regions of the galaxy.
(3) In ALFtS, Amalfi smokes a cigar, which is noted as exceptional because
cities lack the space to grow tobacco. BUT, in ECH(242), he's smoking a
"hydroponic cigar".
(4) In ALFtS, Sgt.Anderson explains to DeFord that one of the drugs in the
anti-agathic regimen removes the need to sleep. BUT, in ECH(264), Amalfi
is awakened from his bed during a crisis.
(5) In ALFtS, the "rule of discretion" is employed to swap DeFord and 300
others from Scranton to NYC. BUT, in ECH(280), Amalfi reflects that the
*only* time he used the rule ("never before or since") was to obtain Jake
the astronomer.
(6) In TToT(455), the "Five Cultural Portraits" note indicates that NYC
left Earthspace in 3975 and reached New Earth in 3998. BUT, in TToT(460),
Blish shifts all his dates 50 years backward: NYC lands on the Blasted
Heath on 3944, and destroys IMT in 3948.
David E. Siegel
> Blish expresses a pile of ideas in his "Cities in Flight" novels. I like
> some of them; nonetheless, I don't consider the books "great" because (a)
> he squandered the settings; eg, New York's million people don't seem to
> *do* anything during their transits, and (b) there are sloppy
> inconsistencies between the books.
>
> Here's my first set of objections; *I* can think of workarounds, but for
> discussion's sake, I'll yet you-the-readers try.
>
"looking for work" but have no need to do so -- they have all the
capacities needed to found independent, viable settlements (as is
shown in TTOT), or, if they prefer a roving life, to set up temporary
colonies on uninhabited planets (of which there seem to be plenty).
Why do they need "work"? Also, there seems to be no particular reason
for the "earth cops" (who have very far-flug operations and powers,
with no obvious support base) to be automatically hostile to all
"oakie" cities. Indeed the "oakie" parallel seems imposed by the
author, not natural -- what the flying cities most resemble in earth's
past are very large trading caravns, or highly skilled contractors,
not individual migrant workers. (In SF they look much like Vinge's
trader culture from _A deepness in the Sky_). I think that the stories
would have been better had Blish dropped the "oakie" analogy. (I also
was sorry for the casual way that deford, a favorite character of
mine, was disposed of -- but then i read the stories in the combined
edition, in internal order, and I know this was a retcon to explain
why deFord was not in the stories set later but written first.)
-DES
Michael S. Schiffer
<dbdfe7e0.02012...@posting.google.com>:
>...
>There is also the structural problem that the Oakie cities are
>always "looking for work" but have no need to do so -- they have
>all the capacities needed to found independent, viable settlements
>(as is shown in TTOT), or, if they prefer a roving life, to set up
>temporary colonies on uninhabited planets (of which there seem to
>be plenty). Why do they need "work"?
Because, until their culture collapses, they want to have the benefits
of their migrant lifestyle: long life (dependent on materials
harvested from a planetary biosphere), access to the trade goods of a
thousand worlds, the ability to practice their professions, etc. The
Okies are self-selected, after all. Anyone who doesn't like the life
can apparently require the city to change course to the nearest
inhabited planet to leave, and people are only let on if they really
want to be and are deemed of use to the city.
When it becomes clear that the migrant life is no longer viable, they
manage (with somewhat unrealistic ease, IMHO) to settle down and
become a planetary society, and most of them have been in the city so
long that they're ready for a change. They also have a built-in
agrarian base ready-made on the planet they settle on, which wouldn't
have been an option in their own galaxy. (At least, one imagines that
the Earth cops frown on Okie cities conquering planets, and IIRC
Amalfi as much as says that they couldn't go it alone on an
uninhabited planet.) New York also had the good fortune to find a
place that could be liberated from bad guys, thus obviating the need
to do their own conquering.
In any case, I'm not sure that there are in fact plenty of
uninhabited, Earthlike planets in Blish's universe. Most of the
planets capable of supporting life seem to have people on them, even
in the middle of a near-empty stellar rift-- or even in the Magellanic
clouds. Given that, plus the cops to keep them honest, their only way
of getting resources from an Earthlike biosphere is to trade for them.
Also, there seems to be no
>particular reason for the "earth cops" (who have very far-flug
>operations and powers, with no obvious support base) to be
>automatically hostile to all "oakie" cities. Indeed the "oakie"
>parallel seems imposed by the author, not natural -- what the
>flying cities most resemble in earth's past are very large trading
>caravns, or highly skilled contractors, not individual migrant
>workers.
To be fair, my impression is that local authorities are frequently
suspicious of the denizens of trading caravans as well. People who
aren't going to be around to face long-term consequences are generally
looked at closely, both because people are always suspicious of aliens
and because the consequences of unscrupulous behavior are less if you
can leave your dissatisfied customers (and your by-blows) behind. In
principle, you'd think that the Dirac and the institution of the Earth
police would keep things more closely knit. But the latter are
stretched thin, and their resources aren't up to keeping close tabs on
every city's Violation log. Given the size of the galaxy, that's not
all that implausible. However, every city is known to be carrying
some violations (plausible-- it's the settled cultures that get to
make the laws, after all). Particularly since the Earth cops are
culturally separate from the cities, treating the cities as
presumptively criminal is the sort of thing that police departments
are rather prone to.
(In SF they look much like Vinge's trader culture from _A
>deepness in the Sky_). I think that the stories would have been
>better had Blish dropped the "oakie" analogy. (I also was sorry
>for the casual way that deford, a favorite character of mine, was
>disposed of -- but then i read the stories in the combined
>edition, in internal order, and I know this was a retcon to
>explain why deFord was not in the stories set later but written
>first.)
My impression was that the bit about deFord being Hazelton's late
predecessor came first, and the juvenile about him was written in full
knowledge that he was to come to an unfortunate end. (Which always
struck me as creepy, but not out of character for Blish.) On the
other hand, I've never read the magazine version, so I can't be sure.
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
msch...@condor.depaul.edu
Martin Lewis
news:dbdfe7e0.02012...@posting.google.com...
> > Blish expresses a pile of ideas in his "Cities in Flight" novels. I
like
> > some of them; nonetheless, I don't consider the books "great" because
(a)
> > he squandered the settings; eg, New York's million people don't seem to
> > *do* anything during their transits, and (b) there are sloppy
> > inconsistencies between the books.
>
> There is also the structural problem that the Oakie cities are always
> "looking for work" but have no need to do so -- they have all the
> capacities needed to found independent, viable settlements (as is
> shown in TTOT), or, if they prefer a roving life, to set up temporary
> colonies on uninhabited planets (of which there seem to be plenty).
> Why do they need "work"?
Yeah, that spoilt it for me. I read it in the collected edition and I
thought the first section leading up to the creation of the spindizzies was
very strong. I was then very disappointed to see how they were used.
A similar problem undermines Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy. Post-scarcity
technology is available but most people chose to be farmers for no reason
but to help the plot.
Martin
Donald J. Harlow
"Michael S. Schiffer" <msch...@condor.depaul.edu> skribis en mesařo
news:Xns919F7AB3822C...@130.133.1.4...
> >deepness in the Sky_). I think that the stories would have been
> >better had Blish dropped the "oakie" analogy.
The "Okie" concept was a very strong and recent one in American culture
(less than a decade and a half old) at the time that Blish wrote the
original stories, and was still fairly strong at the time he died. In 2002,
of course, the Okies are almost forgotten; who reads or watches "The Grapes
of Wrath" today? But I don't know that Blish ever realized that a bunch of
readers would be discussing his work over a computer network in 2002 ...
> >(I also was sorry
> >for the casual way that deford, a favorite character of mine, was
> >disposed of -- but then i read the stories in the combined
> >edition, in internal order, and I know this was a retcon to
> >explain why deFord was not in the stories set later but written
> >first.)
>
> My impression was that the bit about deFord being Hazelton's late
> predecessor came first, and the juvenile about him was written in full
> knowledge that he was to come to an unfortunate end. (Which always
> struck me as creepy, but not out of character for Blish.) On the
> other hand, I've never read the magazine version, so I can't be sure.
>
I don't think I read the magazine version, either, but I read the pbs from
Avon some years before "A Life for the Stars" was published in _Analog_, and
remember the passing mention of a long-gone City Manager (was that the
post?) named deFord, who was ordered shot by the City Fathers, there. Almost
certainly Blish originally intended for him to be nothing but a name, and
then grabbed the name and applied it to a character much, much later.
--
-- Don HARLOW
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/don.html
http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/
Johnny1A
> sie...@acm.org (David E. Siegel) wrote in
> <dbdfe7e0.02012...@posting.google.com>:
> >...
>
> >There is also the structural problem that the Oakie cities are
> >always "looking for work" but have no need to do so -- they have
> >all the capacities needed to found independent, viable settlements
> >(as is shown in TTOT), or, if they prefer a roving life, to set up
> >temporary colonies on uninhabited planets (of which there seem to
> >be plenty). Why do they need "work"?
>
> Because, until their culture collapses, they want to have the benefits
> of their migrant lifestyle: long life (dependent on materials
> harvested from a planetary biosphere), access to the trade goods of a
> thousand worlds, the ability to practice their professions, etc. The
> Okies are self-selected, after all. Anyone who doesn't like the life
> can apparently require the city to change course to the nearest
> inhabited planet to leave, and people are only let on if they really
> want to be and are deemed of use to the city.
Here we hit a snag. Somehow, I suspect that the knowledge that the
Okies had open-ended healthy life-spans would do more than make the
planetary populations suspicious of them. I have a hunch it would
closer to jealous hate. But then, I've never quite seen how the
Earth/Planetary governments are able to restrict the anti-agathic
drugs effectively.
Picture: your wife/husband/parent/child/you is dying of some disease,
or old age, and you _know_ that a dose of ascomycin will fix things.
How far will you go to get that dose of ascomycin, and will the fact
that it's illegal stop you from trying? Then multiply that by the
population of the planet.
>
> When it becomes clear that the migrant life is no longer viable, they
> manage (with somewhat unrealistic ease, IMHO) to settle down and
> become a planetary society, and most of them have been in the city so
> long that they're ready for a change. They also have a built-in
> agrarian base ready-made on the planet they settle on, which wouldn't
> have been an option in their own galaxy. (At least, one imagines that
> the Earth cops frown on Okie cities conquering planets, and IIRC
> Amalfi as much as says that they couldn't go it alone on an
> uninhabited planet.) New York also had the good fortune to find a
> place that could be liberated from bad guys, thus obviating the need
> to do their own conquering.
>
> In any case, I'm not sure that there are in fact plenty of
> uninhabited, Earthlike planets in Blish's universe. Most of the
> planets capable of supporting life seem to have people on them, even
> in the middle of a near-empty stellar rift-- or even in the Magellanic
> clouds. Given that, plus the cops to keep them honest, their only way
> of getting resources from an Earthlike biosphere is to trade for them.
They don't really _need_ resources from Earth-like biospheres, though.
Given their technology, they could get most of what they need from a
carbonaceous asteroid or seven. In fact, a likely result I see would
be New York hunting up a particularly rich rock, with plenty of both
metals and CHON, and just staying there. After all, they have very
little real contact with the inhabited worlds anyway, even when they
land there's a business-only attitude. New York is very insular by
nature under the circumstances, so why not select a rich site and park
there? They could even expand the city once they did, if they were in
a mood to do so.
Even if all the Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way are settled, there
are almost certainl going to be a _lot_ of unclaimed, untouched,
unmapped asteroids all over the place, far more asteroids than
planets, in fact, unless our current understanding of stellar system
formation is _totally_ wrong.
Shermanlee
Michael S. Schiffer
Cities in Flight books.
sherm...@hotmail.com (Johnny1A) wrote in message news:<b3030854.02012...@posting.google.com>...
> msch...@condor.depaul.edu (Michael S. Schiffer) wrote in message news:<Xns919F7AB3822C...@130.133.1.4>...
> > sie...@acm.org (David E. Siegel) wrote in
> > <dbdfe7e0.02012...@posting.google.com>:
> > >...
> > >There is also the structural problem that the Oakie cities are
> > >always "looking for work" but have no need to do so -- they have
> > >all the capacities needed to found independent, viable settlements
> > >(as is shown in TTOT), or, if they prefer a roving life, to set up
> > >temporary colonies on uninhabited planets (of which there seem to
> > >be plenty). Why do they need "work"?
> > Because, until their culture collapses, they want to have the benefits
> > of their migrant lifestyle: long life (dependent on materials
> > harvested from a planetary biosphere), access to the trade goods of a
> > thousand worlds, the ability to practice their professions, etc.
>...
> Here we hit a snag. Somehow, I suspect that the knowledge that the
> Okies had open-ended healthy life-spans would do more than make the
> planetary populations suspicious of them. I have a hunch it would
> closer to jealous hate. But then, I've never quite seen how the
> Earth/Planetary governments are able to restrict the anti-agathic
> drugs effectively.
My impression is that they're just rare and expensive, not totally
unavailable. They ultimately become the medium of exchange throughout
the galaxy, after all, which means people have to be able to get them.
(It's possible to have something unavailable as the basis for your
money, like the gold standard in the mid-twentieth century, but Blish
explicitly says that people have to decide between spending the drugs
and taking them.) The planet He has an unusually large amount of drug
precursors, and Amalfi shows no reluctance in giving the Hevians the
technology to take advantage of it. (As for the planetsiders'
feelings, compare the Third World trading with the First. The
inhabitants of the former know that the latter has access to much
better medical care, among other signs of wealth, and their reaction
does sometimes range from suspicion and resentment to jealous hate.
That doesn't make it impossible to do business.)
>...
> > In any case, I'm not sure that there are in fact plenty of
> > uninhabited, Earthlike planets in Blish's universe. Most of the
> > planets capable of supporting life seem to have people on them, even
> > in the middle of a near-empty stellar rift-- or even in the Magellanic
> > clouds. Given that, plus the cops to keep them honest, their only way
> > of getting resources from an Earthlike biosphere is to trade for them.
> They don't really _need_ resources from Earth-like biospheres, though.
Sure they do. The anti-agathics require plant precursors that can
only be grown (at least in sufficient quantity) on planets, for one
thing. They also need petrochemicals, which are probably by-products
of a biosphere. (ISTR reading that there was a theory that they were
formed by non-biological processes, but I believe that postdates Blish
and, last I heard, was still a minority view.) There's no evidence
that Blish's humans have managed to create small closed-cycle
ecologies, and lots of evidence the other way-- not only do the cities
need to trade with planets, but Amalfi is absolutely certain that the
Vegan Orbital Fort needed a base. (This is the entire reason for his
rather baroque strategy, after all.) They're also not independent of
industrial economies-- they can't even build a new spindizzy, or
install one without a graving dock. Spindizzies and anti-agathics are
the cornerstones of their existence, and they need the resources of
civilized (or at least agrarian, in the case of the drugs) planets for
both.
> Given their technology, they could get most of what they need from a
> carbonaceous asteroid or seven. In fact, a likely result I see would
> be New York hunting up a particularly rich rock, with plenty of both
> metals and CHON, and just staying there.
How? I don't recall any evidence that they have the technology to
economically convert a carbonaceous asteroid to food, medicine, and
other petroleum products, any more than we could do so with diamonds
and water. And they'd be in trouble when their equipment started
breaking down beyond their ability to make replacement parts (which
happened even while they were still connected to the galactic economy,
due to a mere cash crunch). The cities are capable of operating on
their own for decades, but they're not completely self-sufficient, and
probably don't have the capability of becoming so. (It seems unlikely
that a city of hundreds of thousands, or even a million-- I don't
recall if New York's population is ever given-- can replicate the
industrial and technological capabilities of a planetary or
interstellar economy of billions or more.)
After all, they have very
> little real contact with the inhabited worlds anyway, even when they
> land there's a business-only attitude. New York is very insular by
> nature under the circumstances, so why not select a rich site and park
> there? They could even expand the city once they did, if they were in
> a mood to do so.
Why do current New Yorkers pay people in faraway places to grow their
bananas instead of growing their own? Because their environment isn't
suited for banana growing, and there are things they'd rather do than
tend bananas that they're better at (and that can be exchanged for
more bananas than they can grow), and they mostly don't know how to
grow bananas anyway. There might well be a niche for an asteroid
mining culture in Blish's world (though with the spindizzy, it's
unclear whether there'd be much incentive to actually *live* among the
asteroids, since it's about as cheap to commute). But the cities had
a niche that was apparently profitable until the galactic depression,
and when that hits, they don't have the time or resources to try to
completely make over their way of life in space. (On a planet, at
least they won't run out of air or light while they're trying to learn
their new skills, and someone else is growing the food and
anti-agathic crops.) At that, the galaxy is a big place, and there's
nothing that says that no city managed to make a go of such a
strategy. But the ones we see are the ones that can't or won't. (New
York, for example, has a bum spindizzy at first, and by the time
that's repaired it's involved in Amalfi's machinations re the March on
Earth. And after that, they're in even more desperate need of repairs
or a final planetfall.)
Mike
Phillip Thorne
objections-to-logical-acunae; *I* can think of workarounds, but I'd like
to see others' opinions.
(Page numbers refer to the 1970 Doubleday omnibus edition, with the
Afterword by Richard D. Mullen; the grey cover with a milkweed pod
spilling identical bald big-nosed faces. The four novels are abbreviated
TSHS, ALftS, ECH, and TToT.)
(7) In TSHS, the Bridge on Jupiter was supposedly essential to proving the
Locke derivation of the Blackett equation, because of its intense gravity
and magnetic field. Wouldn't it have been easier to *assume* it was
correct and build a proto-spindizzy according to its predictions? Or did
this require one of the "thousands of other things" learned from the
Bridge project?
("The Locke derivation fails dimensional analysis" is not a valid Nth
criticism, because the characters recognize this in TSHS. Blish handwaves
the problem by saying dimensional analysis will have to be re-examined.)
(8) In TSHS, ascomycin is not an anti-agathic: it prevents age-related
diseases, but not death. In ALftS, it's part of a regimen that includes
anti-cholesterol and anti-sleep drugs. BUT in ECH (IIRC), it's described
as "the first of the anti-agathics".
(9) In the history lesson given to DeFord in ALftS(162), it's stated that
the first interstellar mission was in 2021, and the second was c.2375,
which discovered multiple already-established colonies. BUT, in ECH(245),
the "Hamiltonian Exodus" (which colonized Utopia) was sited at about 50
years after the discovery of anti-agathics, which would be c.2070.
(10) In ALftS, NYC is invited to the permanently-muddy feudal planet for
the purposes of industrialization. The locals already had "swan boats",
tread-driven submersibles with optional remote control. If they weren't
industrialized, where'd the boats come from?
(11) "Santa Claus machine" technology is available to NYC. In late
ALftS(225), Amalfi offers to loan Scranton its "brood assembly", which
when fed scrap can either duplicate itself or manufacture City Fathers.
(NYC has 134, he estimates Scranton will need one-third as many, and that
many can be produced in 10 years. So, about three months per unit.) Is
this tech applied to anything else? Why not stop by an asteroid in an
uninhabited, unpatrolled system and build the gear to be more
self-sufficient?
(12) In ECH, it's said all the anti-agathics are always rare: (1) none are
ever synthesized by humans (the Hevians come close in TToT), and (2)
they're derived from natural sources.
If (2), why would they be rare? Just build a bigger bacterial
fermentation tank. Excuse (1) rings just as untrue as melange in the
_Dune_ books -- moreso. IIRC a substitute *is* eventually synthesized by
the Ixians, after millenia of failure by many others. OTOH, "Dune" had
strong economic and political pressures against reducing its scarcity,
which are apparently lacking in CiF -- it's only late in ECH when Earth
establishes a new monetary standard based on anti-agathics (replacing
germanium and the Oc dollar); but before that, it's unclear how many
independent sources there were.
Avram Grumer
tho...@underbase.org (Phillip Thorne) wrote:
> (8) In TSHS, ascomycin is not an anti-agathic: it prevents
> age-related diseases, but not death. In ALftS, it's part of a
> regimen that includes anti-cholesterol and anti-sleep drugs. BUT in
> ECH (IIRC), it's described as "the first of the anti-agathics".
Does the description come from narration, or from a character's mouth?
--
Avram Grumer | av...@grumer.org | http://www.PigsAndFishes.org
In the country of the assless, the half-assed man is king.
Michael S. Schiffer
>...
>(12) In ECH, it's said all the anti-agathics are always rare: (1)
>none are ever synthesized by humans (the Hevians come close in
>TToT), and (2) they're derived from natural sources.
>If (2), why would they be rare? Just build a bigger bacterial
>fermentation tank.
Truffles are rare, impossible to farm, and derived from natural sources.
There's a decent financial incentive to figure out a way to domesticate
or synthesize them, but it hasn't happened yet. Saffron is hugely
expensive per pound, because it depends on a lot of finicky manual labor
to harvest a comparatively small amount. Again, if there were a cheaper
or easier way to do it, we would. It may be that the plants that form
the anti-agathic precursors are rare, dependent on unusual ecosystems,
and not amenable to a domestication or synthetic production. Over the
time scale, I'd expect faster progress in biotech, but my impression is
that Blish's Spenglerian cycles predict a slowdown in scientific
progress during the Earthmanist period. Maybe the next civilization
would have figured out cheap anti-agathics, but the events of the early
fifth millennium made the question moot.
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
Mitch Wagner
happened to Crispin deFord?
What's this "Web of Hercules" thing? Their very existence undercuts the
dramatic value of "The Triumph of Time." All the characters in TToT are
convinced the universe will come to an end, if they are wrong, the entire
novel is a crock.
Blish's treatment of women is pretty bad. There is only one major female
character, Dee, and she is a ninny.
--
Mitch Wagner weblog http://drive.thru.org
Michael S. Schiffer
<MPG.16bb274c9...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>:
>I think the three biggest problems with Cities in Flight are: what
>happened to Crispin deFord?
He was shot by the city fathers "for engineering an egregious
violation of the city's contract with a planet called Epoch". While
it would be interesting to know the full story, that seems pretty
straightforward.
>What's this "Web of Hercules" thing? Their very existence
>undercuts the dramatic value of "The Triumph of Time." All the
>characters in TToT are convinced the universe will come to an end,
>if they are wrong, the entire novel is a crock.
The Web of Hercules, a young rival civilization from, IIRC, a globular
cluster, is destroyed in the universal cataclysm. The universe that
follows (where Acreff-Monales seems to live) appears to have some way
of getting information about the previous universe, including both the
Earthmanists and the Web. (My pet theory is that the Dirac
communicators of the Okie stories, like those in "Beep"/_The Quincunx
of Time_, reach all other Dirac communicators ever in existence, and
Acreff-Monales was able to use the Dirac beep in his research.)
I admit, it seems odd (on both sides) to be willing to kill one
another in order to get to be the monobloc of your own Big Bang, given
that neither personal nor family nor cultural nor species survival is
an issue (or a possibility). Then again, I guess no one had anything
else to do. :-)
>Blish's treatment of women is pretty bad. There is only one major
>female character, Dee, and she is a ninny.
It's true. ISTR the female scientist on the Jupiter station was
pretty unpleasant as well, and Dee's granddaughter in _The Triumph of
Time_ is pretty thin and one-note. I don't think female characters
were Blish's strong point, and when they show up, they're pretty
stereotyped.
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
Mark Fergerson
<snip>
> ... (My pet theory is that the Dirac
> communicators of the Okie stories, like those in "Beep"/_The Quincunx
> of Time_, reach all other Dirac communicators ever in existence, and
> Acreff-Monales was able to use the Dirac beep in his research.)
Now there's a scary thought. OTOH there's that article in SciAm about gravity
penetrating from one "sheet" of this (hypothetically folded) Universe to
another, perhaps something similar carries Dirac 'casts from one Universe to
another.
If so, then some of the "weird" 'casts heard in _Beep_ and TQoT aren't from
this spacetime at all.
Mark L. Fergerson
Mitch Wagner
msch...@condor.depaul.edu says...
> Mitch Wagner <mwa...@TheWorld.com> wrote in
> <MPG.16bb274c9...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>:
>
> >I think the three biggest problems with Cities in Flight are: what
> >happened to Crispin deFord?
>
> He was shot by the city fathers "for engineering an egregious
> violation of the city's contract with a planet called Epoch". While
> it would be interesting to know the full story, that seems pretty
> straightforward.
>
It kind of requires the full story. How do we get from the up-and-coming
fresh-faced enthusiastic young Scrantonian to the man who committed a sin
egregious enough to be shot?
> >What's this "Web of Hercules" thing? Their very existence
> >undercuts the dramatic value of "The Triumph of Time." All the
> >characters in TToT are convinced the universe will come to an end,
> >if they are wrong, the entire novel is a crock.
>
> The Web of Hercules, a young rival civilization from, IIRC, a globular
> cluster, is destroyed in the universal cataclysm. The universe that
> follows (where Acreff-Monales seems to live) appears to have some way
> of getting information about the previous universe, including both the
> Earthmanists and the Web. (My pet theory is that the Dirac
> communicators of the Okie stories, like those in "Beep"/_The Quincunx
> of Time_, reach all other Dirac communicators ever in existence, and
> Acreff-Monales was able to use the Dirac beep in his research.)
>
I thought that the universe, and the Web of Hercules, somehow survived
the cataclysm in TToT, and Acreff-Monales was writing from there.
Michael S. Schiffer
>In article <Xns91A179143B3F...@130.133.1.4>,
>msch...@condor.depaul.edu says...
>> Mitch Wagner <mwa...@TheWorld.com> wrote in
>> <MPG.16bb274c9...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>:
>> >I think the three biggest problems with Cities in Flight are:
>> >what happened to Crispin deFord?
>> He was shot by the city fathers "for engineering an egregious
>> violation of the city's contract with a planet called Epoch".
>> While it would be interesting to know the full story, that seems
>> pretty straightforward.
>It kind of requires the full story. How do we get from the
>up-and-coming fresh-faced enthusiastic young Scrantonian to the
>man who committed a sin egregious enough to be shot?
I got the impression that it wasn't so much a "sin" as a fatal policy
difference with the City Fathers. Don't Amalfi and Hazelton worry
once or twice that some gambit of theirs, intended for the survival of
the city, will go wrong and get them shot by the machines? (ISTR one
reminding the other of the fate of Hazelton's predecessor.) I figured
it was the old maverick standby of "Well, if this doesn't work out,
I'll be court-martialed and shot, but if it does they'll give me
another medal"-- except that for once, the risk didn't pan out and the
guy *was* shot. Offstage, though; Amalfi and Hazelton's on-stage
risks pretty much always work. DeFord's death is a pointer that
things could go the other way-- sort of a memento mori for our heroes.
(Still, subsequently writing a fairly light juvenile about the guy is
an admittedly weird thing to do.)
>> >What's this "Web of Hercules" thing? Their very existence
>> >undercuts the dramatic value of "The Triumph of Time." All the
>> >characters in TToT are convinced the universe will come to an
>> >end, if they are wrong, the entire novel is a crock.
>> The Web of Hercules, a young rival civilization from, IIRC, a
>> globular cluster, is destroyed in the universal cataclysm. The
>> universe that follows (where Acreff-Monales seems to live)
>> appears to have some way of getting information about the
>> previous universe, including both the Earthmanists and the Web.
>> (My pet theory is that the Dirac communicators of the Okie
>> stories, like those in "Beep"/_The Quincunx of Time_, reach all
>> other Dirac communicators ever in existence, and Acreff-Monales
>> was able to use the Dirac beep in his research.)
>I thought that the universe, and the Web of Hercules, somehow
>survived the cataclysm in TToT, and Acreff-Monales was writing
>from there.
Not the Web, unless I'm misremembering. The universe reformed, as
predicted by the Hevian scientists (the idea was that mass would be
converted to energy and energy to mass as the positive matter and
antimatter universes passed through one another. After the collision,
the two universes would go on their ways, and all the mass-energy
would still be there, but at Big Bang temperatures and completely
disorganized. A few eons later, Acreff-Monales' civilization
developed, somehow discovered the pre-Ginnunga-Gap history, and A-M
wrote his "Five Cultural Portraits" of the pre-disaster Milky Way.
Our heroes, meanwhile, go off in other directions entirely in
multidimensional space, to calve off new universes of their own. The
idea there (as I understod it) is that in the cataclysm, it'll be
possible to form the seed crystal of one universe each, with
continuous creation[1] (discovered by the Hevians) scaling up the mass
after the initial creation. Somehow, the fact that a human body (and
spacesuit) was the initial mass will have some effect on the future
development of that universe. Again, I don't really see the point,
but it gave them something to do.
Mike
[1] Yes, Blish's universe had both a Big Bang and continuous creation.
Whether this qualifies as splitting the difference or simple
perversity, I can't say.
Johnny1A
This entire last story (in internal time) is a sloppy mess. The
cosmology is probably the _most_ coherent thing about it.
Along with the other confusions, there was a sort of religious fanatic
crusader who appears to be threatening the Okie world. Is he
descended from New Yorkers?
Or did other Milky Way expatriates arrive in the Cloud?
Dee suddenly seems to have a father-figure fixation on Amalfi, who
responds. This seems to be a pointless subplot.
IMO, _none_ of the explanations for A-M and his history of the Milky
Way make any sense, or enough sense to add up to anything. My
personal _opinion_, and nothing more, is that Blish originally
intended to have Amalfi pull a last minute save and rescue things, and
changed his mind as he wrote.
Something sort of similar runs through the Foundation series, and it's
other-author elements as well. Recall that Gaia was supposed to
spread throughout the Milky Way and form Galaxia by the time of the
Second Empire, which won't come to pass. That's where Asimov seemed
to be going in his Foundation stories.
Now, from the very beginning, we see quotes from the future
Encyclopeda Galactica, published in the time of the Second Empire.
_But_...as David Brin rightly points out in one of his other-author
sequels to the Foundation stories, _Galaxia would not have books!_
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
The point about the spindizzy is a good one, I had forgotten that, but
it extends the problem that started the thread in the first place. In
order to stay somewhat indepedent for decades at a time, they _should_
have the ability to built and maintain their own tools and equipment.
Why they don't is never clearly explained.
Now, it might be that they can fix and build _most_ of their own gear,
but that the spindizzies require very special facilities. That might
make sense, who knows what's involved in the practical details of
building a spindizzy?
But recall that NY NY had a 'brood assembly', which could take in
scrap and junk and turn out City Father supercomputers, which are
certainly very complex machines. Given that sort of equipment, I
would expect the Okie Cities to be largely self-sufficient in tools
and machines, except maybe for spindizzies. I can't quite picture
such a replication tech being useful only for computers.
As for growing the plants that provide the biochemical basis for the
anti-agathic drugs, there is no clear reason why they _couldn't_ do
that on a suitable asteroid. In order to survive long (decades) deep
space runs, the cities would _have_ to possess some space-agriculture.
Insofar as anyone knows, most of the necesary ingredients for farming
can be found in certain asteroids.
Now, certainly it would be hard at first, since we have no practical
experience in such things, but the New Yorkers are from a culture that
has had space travel for many, many centuries. The knowledge should
be there, especially since one of the stocks in trade of the Okies is
knowledge. I would expect the necessary information to be filed away
somewhere in New York's databanks.
An interesting thought: if some early first-wave colonist on one of
the older planets happened to respond especially well to the longevity
regimen, lasting for centuries of time, it occurs to me that he/she
might have the odd experience of having home drop by for a visit.
For ex, imagine you emigrated from Chicago early in the interstellar
age, and it happens that you respond well to longevity, like Lazarus
Long, so 7 or 8 centuries later, you're still around when Chicago
lands on your new world! That ought to be a distinctly odd sensation!
Shermanlee
Klyfix
sherm...@hotmail.com (Johnny1A) writes:
>
>IMO, _none_ of the explanations for A-M and his history of the Milky
>Way make any sense, or enough sense to add up to anything. My
>personal _opinion_, and nothing more, is that Blish originally
>intended to have Amalfi pull a last minute save and rescue things, and
>changed his mind as he wrote.
>
Hmm, I recall from an old copy of "Year 2018!" (original title of
"They Shall Have Stars") I used to have that the timeline had
Amalfi dying in a hunting accident at the time Blish later has the
Ginnunga-Gap occuring. Blish's explanation, that things should
have endings and thus he wrote "The Triumph of Time" to end
stuff, seems to me to be a poor justification for an unnecessary
story. Oh well....
V. S. Greene : kly...@aol.com : Boston, near Arkham...
Eckzylon: http://m1.aol.com/klyfix/eckzylon.html
Fear The Pretzels Of Death
Michael S. Schiffer
<b3030854.02012...@posting.google.com>:
>...
>The point about the spindizzy is a good one, I had forgotten that,
>but it extends the problem that started the thread in the first
>place. In order to stay somewhat indepedent for decades at a time,
>they _should_ have the ability to built and maintain their own tools
>and equipment. Why they don't is never clearly explained.
They might be able to get by with highly durable systems and a big load
of spare parts. After all, raw materials are a problem for them in
between stars as well. Assuming things are standardized enough, it
might be easier to carry replacement parts than raw materials plus the
machines to turn them into parts.
>Now, it might be that they can fix and build _most_ of their own
>gear, but that the spindizzies require very special facilities.
>That might make sense, who knows what's involved in the practical
>details of building a spindizzy?
>But recall that NY NY had a 'brood assembly', which could take in
>scrap and junk and turn out City Father supercomputers, which are
>certainly very complex machines. Given that sort of equipment, I
>would expect the Okie Cities to be largely self-sufficient in tools
>and machines, except maybe for spindizzies. I can't quite picture
>such a replication tech being useful only for computers.
That sort of thing should certainly have had broader implications, and
didn't. Did it show up anywhere other than the (last-written) _A Life
for the Stars_? There were a lot of aspects of city life in that book
that weren't, I think, consistent with the earlier written books.
(Surely we would have noticed that mortal "passenger" population, among
other things.)
On the other hand, I can easily see something that's good for assembling
electronics (and the City Fathers were probably transistorized, given
that germanium monetary standard, so they had a minimum of moving parts)
but not nuclear or gravitic devices, and spindizzies were both. Given
modern conventions, it wouldn't be hard to come up with nanotech
assemblers that could make most objects, but weren't stable in high
radiation environments. Realistically, though, I don't think the main
stories were made with those brood assemblies in mind, and they probably
can't really be made consistent with generalized automatic
manufacturing.
>As for growing the plants that provide the biochemical basis for the
>anti-agathic drugs, there is no clear reason why they _couldn't_ do
>that on a suitable asteroid. In order to survive long (decades)
>deep space runs, the cities would _have_ to possess some
>space-agriculture. Insofar as anyone knows, most of the necesary
>ingredients for farming can be found in certain asteroids.
It's one thing to be able to grow crops specially bred or engineered for
the environment. But without genetic engineering (which wasn't really a
fully-developed concept at the time Blish was writing), it may well be
impossible to breed the antiagathic crops to produce the necessary
compounds in quantity while changing their requirements that
drastically. There are plenty of plants now that aren't yet amenable to
converting to mildly different terrestrial environments, let alone
carbonaceous chondrites with atmospheres kept in by spindizzy fields.
We've gotten a lot better at biochemical synthesis in the last
generation in ways that weren't obvious from Blish's standpoint, and
we're still not that good. (I'd guess we will be long before a thousand
years have passed. On the other hand, we won't have a manned base in
the Jovian system by 2018. Blish's future is the future visible from
the 1950's. One imagines that the 2050's will have some arch comments
on our lack of vision as well.)
>...
>An interesting thought: if some early first-wave colonist on one of
>the older planets happened to respond especially well to the
>longevity regimen, lasting for centuries of time, it occurs to me
>that he/she might have the odd experience of having home drop by for
>a visit.
That is a cool idea.
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
mike stone
>
>Along with the other confusions, there was a sort of religious fanatic
>crusader who appears to be threatening the Okie world. Is he
>descended from New Yorkers?
>Or did other Milky Way expatriates arrive in the Cloud?
Yes - In ECH amalfi assumes that quite a few "Bindlestiffs" who have made the
Milky Way too hot for them will have fled to the Clouds. IMT were simply the
most notorious
As for Jorn the Apostle, his origins are unknown, but Amalfi seems to assume
three possiblilities.
1) He is decended from the serf population over whom IMT ruled
2) He is (just possibly) descended from a surviving ruler of IMT
3) That he is of Okie descent
--
Mike Stone - Peterborough England
Last words of King Edward II.
"I always said that Roger Mortimer was a pain in the - - - AAARGHH!!!"
Jack Bohn
Wasn't one of the beeps in "Beep" (or probably _Quincunx_, if they
differ) the message "REMEBER THOR V!" ?
I used to be more up on Blish, but I can't remember now. I think
_Midsummer Century_ also used a phrase from the past (or future) from
another one of Blish's fictions that seemed contradictory to the
timeline of that book.
On an aside: from "Beep" to the Spenglarian CiF, is it likely Blish
personally *wanted* the universe to be deterministic?
--
-Jack
Dwight Thieme
: On an aside: from "Beep" to the Spenglarian CiF, is it likely Blish
: personally *wanted* the universe to be deterministic?
From various comments, forwards, asides, prefaces, and of course,
the text itself, I gather that Mr. Blish thought that life was
not supposed to be easy, and that you shouldn't feel entitled to
bennies like 'free will' just because you happen to reside in this
universe.
Bill & Sue Miller
I'll always remember.
The wild dash through the galaxy using the booster planet & the subsequent
battle in the "jungle"...
The scenes on the Bridge...
The ending of _They Shall Have Stars_...
Scranton taking off...
I'm not so keen on _The Triumph of Time_ but overall I rate this series
pretty high. My .sig used to be "Remember Thor Five!" I think Blish is
one of the all time greats. My Essential Blish List is the first 3 Cities
books, "Beep", and _A Case of Conscience_.
--
Home: wbmi...@ghg.net
Work: william....@jsc.nasa.gov
Homepage: http://www.ghg.net/wbmiller3
Richard Horton
>Hmm, I recall from an old copy of "Year 2018!" (original title of
>"They Shall Have Stars")
Nitpicking, though since as far as I can tell _They Shall Have Stars_
was Blish's preferred title (for obvious reasons) and _Year 2018!_ a
silly editorial imposition (Wollheim???), it seems worth making the
point -- I'm pretty sure the UK edition of _They Shall Have Stars_
dates to 1956, while the US edition of _Year 2018!_ dates to 1957.
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.tangentonline.com)
Michael S. Schiffer
<3C533D52...@ghg.net>:
>Inconsistencies, errors, yes, and yet.... there are parts of these
>books I'll always remember.
>The wild dash through the galaxy using the booster planet & the
>subsequent battle in the "jungle"...
>The scenes on the Bridge...
>The ending of _They Shall Have Stars_...
>Scranton taking off...
>I'm not so keen on _The Triumph of Time_ but overall I rate this
>series pretty high. My .sig used to be "Remember Thor Five!" I
>think Blish is one of the all time greats. My Essential Blish List
>is the first 3 Cities books, "Beep", and _A Case of Conscience_.
I'd toss _Black Easter_ in there. (Not _The Day After Judgment, though
I like that one as well.)
Klyfix
Horton <rrho...@prodigy.net> writes:
>
>On 26 Jan 2002 04:52:42 GMT, kly...@aol.comedy (Klyfix) wrote:
>
>>Hmm, I recall from an old copy of "Year 2018!" (original title of
>>"They Shall Have Stars")
>
>Nitpicking, though since as far as I can tell _They Shall Have Stars_
>was Blish's preferred title (for obvious reasons) and _Year 2018!_ a
>silly editorial imposition (Wollheim???), it seems worth making the
>point -- I'm pretty sure the UK edition of _They Shall Have Stars_
>dates to 1956, while the US edition of _Year 2018!_ dates to 1957.
>
Hmm, okay. I just kinda figured it was the original title
because I'd only seen it in that one volume. The main
thing that stood out to me was that timeline in the
back which had Mayor Amalfi dying in a hunting
accident as oppose to the silly "Let's Blow Up
the Universe!" ending in "The Triumph of Time."
Nyrath the nearly wise
> From various comments, forwards, asides, prefaces, and of course,
> the text itself, I gather that Mr. Blish thought that life was
> not supposed to be easy, and that you shouldn't feel entitled to
> bennies like 'free will' just because you happen to reside in this
> universe.
Oh, I dunno. It seems to me that *lack* of free will
is a bennie. "I cannot be held responsible for my actions
because everything is preordained."
Harry Erwin
There are limitations on the complexity of a culture as a function of
the population size. Apparently 5000 is too small for humans to survive
in the long term--specialized skills get lost too easily. Yes, NYC would
have libraries, but that's only book knowledge. Imagine what would
happen if you needed to build a nuclear sub from scratch and you had
only the expertise and facilities in NYC to draw on. Your ramp-up would
be decades.
>
> But recall that NY NY had a 'brood assembly', which could take in
> scrap and junk and turn out City Father supercomputers, which are
> certainly very complex machines. Given that sort of equipment, I
> would expect the Okie Cities to be largely self-sufficient in tools
> and machines, except maybe for spindizzies. I can't quite picture
> such a replication tech being useful only for computers.
>
> As for growing the plants that provide the biochemical basis for the
> anti-agathic drugs, there is no clear reason why they _couldn't_ do
> that on a suitable asteroid. In order to survive long (decades) deep
> space runs, the cities would _have_ to possess some space-agriculture.
> Insofar as anyone knows, most of the necesary ingredients for farming
> can be found in certain asteroids.
But not all. We're discovering that you need a fairly large region for a
stable biosphere. (Read up on Biosphere II.)
>
> Now, certainly it would be hard at first, since we have no practical
> experience in such things, but the New Yorkers are from a culture that
> has had space travel for many, many centuries. The knowledge should
> be there, especially since one of the stocks in trade of the Okies is
> knowledge. I would expect the necessary information to be filed away
> somewhere in New York's databanks.
>
> An interesting thought: if some early first-wave colonist on one of
> the older planets happened to respond especially well to the longevity
> regimen, lasting for centuries of time, it occurs to me that he/she
> might have the odd experience of having home drop by for a visit.
>
> For ex, imagine you emigrated from Chicago early in the interstellar
> age, and it happens that you respond well to longevity, like Lazarus
> Long, so 7 or 8 centuries later, you're still around when Chicago
> lands on your new world! That ought to be a distinctly odd sensation!
>
> Shermanlee
--
Harry Erwin, <mailto:ha...@dherwin.org>
Harry Erwin
mike stone
>But not all. We're discovering that you need a fairly large region for a
>stable biosphere. (Read up on Biosphere II.)
>
But why could they not have one?
After all, in ECH it required only the spindizzies of two or three Okie cities
to set the planet He on its merry way - and the same later for Hern VI. This
leaves me wondering why the Okies didn't find an uninhabited planet or two (or
even an inhabited one were the locals were co-operative) and just sail away
into the sunset
Frex, I suspect the Hamiltonians on Utopia would have been willing enough -
presumably they didn't _enjoy_ living in the same solar system with the
Hruntans - and latterly the Earth Police as well. They would have at least as
much political freedom on a dirigible planet as in their current situation -
and it would give the Okies a permanent home at least as good as the one they
got later on New Earth
As for the Earth cops - well they either get out of the way when the planet
starts moving, or else their ships become a few little white-hot craters on
Utopia's leading hemisphere - like mini versions of the Orbital Fort.
Timothy Little
> Oh, I dunno. It seems to me that *lack* of free will is a
>bennie. "I cannot be held responsible for my actions because
>everything is preordained."
"I understand. However, I cannot be held responsible for your
imminent punishment since my actions are also preordained. Ain't life
a bitch?"
- Tim
Johnny1A
> On the other hand, we won't have a manned base in
> the Jovian system by 2018. Blish's future is the future visible from
> the 1950's. One imagines that the 2050's will have some arch comments
> on our lack of vision as well.)
No doubt. But though I agree it's unlikely, I'm not prepared to bet
that we _absolutely_ won't have manned bases in the Jovian satellary
system by 2018. It's _very_ unlikely, but that's as far as I care to
go. Things can change suddenly, and at times they have done just
that.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
Depending on how you look at it and define it, a deterministic
universe and free will can be quite compatible.
Shermanlee
Michael S. Schiffer
>msch...@condor.depaul.edu (Michael S. Schiffer) wrote in message
I'd bet on it. Even an Apollo level turnaround wouldn't get us manned
bases on a Jovian moon in 2018-- we'd go for something more romantic,
like Mars, or something more practical, like powersats or asteroid
mining or a moonbase, and any of those would take us most of the way to
2018 before we actually got the metal bent and the ships launched.
*Maybe* with a real wild card (e.g., the spindizzy is invented, making
travel to other planets cheaper than flying is now), but even a
propulsion breakthrough won't make living in vacuum or corrosive
atmospheres cheap. I'd love to be wrong, since a base in the Jovian
system implies a lot of technological and economic breakthroughs, but
it's about as likely as me finding a multimillion dollar lottery ticket
on the street tomorrow.
aRJay
<sherm...@hotmail.com> writes
your prediction using the same time scale as Blish. i.e. A manned based
there by 2080?
--
aRJay
"In this great and creatorless universe, where so much beautiful has
come to be out of the chance interactions of the basic properties of
matter, it seems so important that we love one another."
- Lucy Kemnitzer
Michael S. Schiffer
<20020127154106...@mb-ct.aol.com>:
>>From: harry...@sunderland.ac.uk (Harry Erwin)
>>But not all. We're discovering that you need a fairly large
>>region for a stable biosphere. (Read up on Biosphere II.)
>But why could they not have one?
>After all, in ECH it required only the spindizzies of two or three
>Okie cities to set the planet He on its merry way - and the same
>later for Hern VI. This leaves me wondering why the Okies didn't
>find an uninhabited planet or two (or even an inhabited one were
>the locals were co-operative) and just sail away into the sunset
IIRC, they had to shut down the City Fathers to be able to set up
He's spindizzies, because the machines thought it was crazily
dangerous to the city's safety and/or its finances. In the end, it
worked out, but it wasn't an experiment anyone in NYC's memory had
ever tried before.
In any case, once they've done that, they've effectively settled on a
planet, even if the planet's dirigible. If they wanted to do that,
they could have done so at any time, either individually ("I want
off") or en masse. They seemed to prefer to trade for the goods they
needed rather than produce them themselves, which is no different
from most of us in principle. (I don't own a farm or a clothing
factory or a pharmaceutical company, do you?)
>Frex, I suspect the Hamiltonians on Utopia would have been willing
>enough - presumably they didn't _enjoy_ living in the same solar
>system with the Hruntans - and latterly the Earth Police as well.
Maybe, though that would require an incredibly high degree of trust
in the city. (As it did for the Hevians, but the ones Amalfi dealt
with were a comparatively small and unified group who had a perhaps
unjustified level of confidence due to the New Yorkers' help with the
bandit city.) It would also require the cops and the Hruntans to
leave them alone during the installation phase, which IIRC took
months or years.
>...
>As for the Earth cops - well they either get out of the way when
>the planet starts moving, or else their ships become a few little
>white-hot craters on Utopia's leading hemisphere - like mini
>versions of the Orbital Fort.
That works when it's a surprise. If the Earth cops really object to
the practice once it gets going, they're equally capable of mounting
spindizzies on uninhabited worlds and playing cosmic billiards. Or
just putting ship-sized rocks in the way-- that didn't matter for
Hern VI because it was uninhabited, but it's presumably the
equivalent of a nuclear bombardment on an inhabited world.
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
Michael S. Schiffer
<yBZ0F2Al...@escore.demon.co.uk>:
>In article <b3030854.02012...@posting.google.com>,
>Johnny1A
><sherm...@hotmail.com> writes
>>msch...@condor.depaul.edu (Michael S. Schiffer) wrote in message
>>news:<Xns91A1EECE1BA2...@130.133.1.4>...
>>> On the other hand, we won't have a manned base in
>>> the Jovian system by 2018. Blish's future is the future
>>> visible from the 1950's. One imagines that the 2050's will
>>> have some arch comments on our lack of vision as well.)
>>No doubt. But though I agree it's unlikely, I'm not prepared to
>>bet that we _absolutely_ won't have manned bases in the Jovian
>>satellary system by 2018. It's _very_ unlikely, but that's as
>>far as I care to go. Things can change suddenly, and at times
>>they have done just that.
>I think that is both true and unfair, would you feel as confident
>of your prediction using the same time scale as Blish. i.e. A
>manned based there by 2080?
No. But I wasn't commenting negatively on Blish's predictive
capability, just comparing the future he imagined to the future as it
worked out-- with potentially more powerful biotech (though probably
without the convenient anti-agathic compounds) and less extensive
manned spaceflight (even without the spindizzy). I don't think we
can do any better imagining seventy or eighty years in the future
than Blish could, we'd just make different mistakes.
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
mike stone
>
OK - I was skipping over a few problems. But a world in Utopia's situation
might be desparate enough to try anyway
More generally, the question arises of why only Okies can do these things.
Presumably they aren't the only people in the Galaxy with access to
spindizzies. Iirc the Earth cops were going around incorporating all
independent worlds into one Empire. I should at least some would aave the
capability to do for themselves what Amalfi did for He - and value their
independence enough to risk it
This is my fundamental gripe about CiF - and ECH in particular. They have a
technology that can move worlds around - and only one Mayor of one city ever
really uses it in any serious way. Doc Smith would have known better
Basically I consider CiF an ok (Okie?) read, but the only one that I _really_
like is "They Shall Have Stars". Of course, reading it around age eleven _does_
help, but I think I read TToT not long after, and didn't like that one half so
much
mstemper - emis . com
>In article <Xns91A179143B3F...@130.133.1.4>, msch...@condor.depaul.edu says...
>> Mitch Wagner <mwa...@TheWorld.com> wrote in <MPG.16bb274c9...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>:
>>
>> >I think the three biggest problems with Cities in Flight are: what
>> >happened to Crispin deFord?
>> He was shot by the city fathers "for engineering an egregious
>> violation of the city's contract with a planet called Epoch". While
>> it would be interesting to know the full story, that seems pretty
>> straightforward.
>It kind of requires the full story. How do we get from the up-and-coming
>fresh-faced enthusiastic young Scrantonian to the man who committed a sin
>egregious enough to be shot?
As I recall it, deFord liked to play fast and loose with the rules. The
first time I read CiF, it didn't surprise me at all to hear that he'd
been shot for exactly that.
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
Always use apostrophe's and "quotation marks" properly.
Nyrath the nearly wise
> This is my fundamental gripe about CiF - and ECH in particular. They
> have a technology that can move worlds around - and only one Mayor
> of one city ever really uses it in any serious way. Doc Smith would
> have known better
Well, as a minor quibble, IIRC moving a planet by
spindizzy *was* against the law. The Earth Cops
would break up your city for that crime.
SBMC
news:b3030854.02012...@posting.google.com:
> Depending on how you look at it and define it, a deterministic
> universe and free will can be quite compatible.
>
Yes, for it was pre-destined that your free will would say that. :)
mike stone
Could they? I don't recall anything to that effect?
NY was wanted for murder after using Hern VI to destroy the Orbital Fort - but
that was for having destroyed another "city" (as the OF was assumed to be) not
specifically for moving the planet.
Ted Nolan
<spoiler>
Wasn't he shot for buying an alien invisibility machine which turned out not
to work? And which later tured out to be working after all? Ie he was shot
for no good reason..
Ted
mike stone
>>As I recall it, deFord liked to play fast and loose with the rules. The
>>first time I read CiF, it didn't surprise me at all to hear that he'd
>>been shot for exactly that.
>>
>>--
>>Michael F. Stemper
>>#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
>
><spoiler>
>
>
>
>
>Wasn't he shot for buying an alien invisibility machine which turned out not
>to work? And which later tured out to be working after all? Ie he was shot
>for no good reason..
No - that was later.
He was shot for violating the city''s contract with a planet called Epoch -
exact nature of the violation (or indeed of the contract) not stated
David E. Siegel
> Johnny1A <sherm...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > msch...@condor.depaul.edu (Michael S. Schiffer) wrote in message
> news:<2ff0d741.02012...@posting.google.com>...
> >
> >
> > > >...
>
>
> the population size. Apparently 5000 is too small for humans to survive
> in the long term--specialized skills get lost too easily. Yes, NYC would
> have libraries, but that's only book knowledge. Imagine what would
> happen if you needed to build a nuclear sub from scratch and you had
> only the expertise and facilities in NYC to draw on. Your ramp-up would
> be decades.
>
The current population of NYC is several million. Even granting that
far from all of them would travel on the NY "City in flight" 5000
seems at least 2 orders of magnitude too low for the population, and
NY, NY is probably large enough to maintain a technical culture in
isolation, or nearly so.
> >
> > But recall that NY NY had a 'brood assembly', which could take in
> > scrap and junk and turn out City Father supercomputers, which are
> > certainly very complex machines. Given that sort of equipment, I
> > would expect the Okie Cities to be largely self-sufficient in tools
> > and machines, except maybe for spindizzies. I can't quite picture
> > such a replication tech being useful only for computers.
> >
> > As for growing the plants that provide the biochemical basis for the
> > anti-agathic drugs, there is no clear reason why they _couldn't_ do
> > that on a suitable asteroid. In order to survive long (decades) deep
> > space runs, the cities would _have_ to possess some space-agriculture.
> > Insofar as anyone knows, most of the necesary ingredients for farming
> > can be found in certain asteroids.
>
> But not all. We're discovering that you need a fairly large region for a
> stable biosphere. (Read up on Biosphere II.)
There is a large difference between a couple of acres and the volume
of a large asteroid tunneled out for farming. Many of the problems in
Biosphere II were probably due to inexperience -- we don't yet know
much about building and maintaining a closed ecology. The cities must
know how to do this right, or they can't possibly survive journeys of
multiple years between stars.
-DES
lal_truckee
>harry...@sunderland.ac.uk (Harry Erwin) wrote in message news:<1f6ocyj.9piogxq0mzl6N%harry...@sunderland.ac.uk>...
>
>>Johnny1A <sherm...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>msch...@condor.depaul.edu (Michael S. Schiffer) wrote in message
>>>
>> news:<2ff0d741.02012...@posting.google.com>...
>>
>>>
>>>>>...
>>>>>
>>
>>
>>There are limitations on the complexity of a culture as a function of
>>the population size. Apparently 5000 is too small for humans to survive
>>in the long term--specialized skills get lost too easily. Yes, NYC would
>>have libraries, but that's only book knowledge. Imagine what would
>>happen if you needed to build a nuclear sub from scratch and you had
>>only the expertise and facilities in NYC to draw on. Your ramp-up would
>>be decades.
>>
>
>The current population of NYC is several million. Even granting that
>far from all of them would travel on the NY "City in flight" 5000
>seems at least 2 orders of magnitude too low for the population, and
>NY, NY is probably large enough to maintain a technical culture in
>isolation, or nearly so.
>
I remember (possible inaccurately) that the City with Two Names, Twice
was actually just Manhatten. Which itself has a current population
orders of magnitude greater than 5000, so your point would still be
valid. However, IIRC earth cities, at the time the Okie City's launched
themselves, were pretty sorry places: it's unclear to me if current
population levels were aboard at launch.
Mitch Wagner
. com (Michael Stemper) says...
> In article <MPG.16bb68d23...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>, Mitch Wagner <mwa...@TheWorld.com> writes:
> >In article <Xns91A179143B3F...@130.133.1.4>, msch...@condor.depaul.edu says...
> >> Mitch Wagner <mwa...@TheWorld.com> wrote in <MPG.16bb274c9...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>:
> >>
> >> >I think the three biggest problems with Cities in Flight are: what
> >> >happened to Crispin deFord?
> >> He was shot by the city fathers "for engineering an egregious
> >> violation of the city's contract with a planet called Epoch". While
> >> it would be interesting to know the full story, that seems pretty
> >> straightforward.
> >It kind of requires the full story. How do we get from the up-and-coming
> >fresh-faced enthusiastic young Scrantonian to the man who committed a sin
> >egregious enough to be shot?
>
> As I recall it, deFord liked to play fast and loose with the rules. The
> first time I read CiF, it didn't surprise me at all to hear that he'd
> been shot for exactly that.
True, and you don't have to be considered a really bad person to get
shot by the City Fathers in the "Cities in Flight" New York. That's my
error: I was thinking about the story in contemporary American terms,
how does the good-hearted Crispin deFord turn into the bloke so evil
that he rates the death penalty?
But you don't HAVE to be convicted of some evil thing to get the death
penalty in "Cities in Flight" New York. All it takes is for the City
Fathers to think that it's good for the city that you be dead.
Still, I think it may have been a flaw to leave that part of deFord's
story out of CiF, glossing it over with a quick paragraph mentioned in
passing.
--
Mitch Wagner weblog http://drive.thru.org
Johnny1A
Seriously, the problem is semantic. 'Deterministic' implies conscious
choice on the part of a higher power. It's almost a religious
concept, with shades of Calvnism. Everything was consciously decided
long ago, and nobody can change it.
Try using the word 'immutable' instead. For example, from our point
of view today, the decisions of George Washington are fixed and
unchangeable, a part of the past. From _his_ point of view then, they
were free will, part of the present. The continuum could be
immutable, and still include free will. The fact that someone from
the future already knows what your decision will be before you make it
just means that he/she sees your free-will action from a different
point of view in time.
Shermanlee
mike stone
>I remember (possible inaccurately) that the City with Two Names, Twice
>was actually just Manhatten. Which itself has a current population
>orders of magnitude greater than 5000, so your point would still be
>valid. However, IIRC earth cities, at the time the Okie City's launched
>themselves, were pretty sorry places: it's unclear to me if current
>population levels were aboard at launch.
>
In ALFtS (Ch 3 iirc) Frad Haskins tells DeFord that the poulation of NY is
about one million
mike stone
>
>True, and you don't have to be considered a really bad person to get
>shot by the City Fathers in the "Cities in Flight" New York. That's my
>error: I was thinking about the story in contemporary American terms,
>how does the good-hearted Crispin deFord turn into the bloke so evil
>that he rates the death penalty?
>
>But you don't HAVE to be convicted of some evil thing to get the death
>penalty in "Cities in Flight" New York. All it takes is for the City
>Fathers to think that it's good for the city that you be dead.
>
They could of course simply order you put off at the next port of call - sort
of "We want you off" instead of "I want off" - but I suppose if that meant
losing access to anti-agathics it might be viewed as just the death sentence in
another form.
mike stone
>
>>I remember (possible inaccurately) that the City with Two Names, Twice
>>was actually just Manhatten.
Which raises a small point. From Ch 2 of ALFtS it seems that the spindizzy
field is spherical.
Afaicr we are never told the dimensions of Scranton-in-Flight, but let's
assume (conservatively I suspect) that it is a circle of one mile radius from
the city centre. This means that when it takes off it leaves behind a crater
two miles across, and one mile deep in the middle.
I wouldn't want to be a property owner anwhere nearby - the problems with
subsidence could be fairly major. And I'm a bit surprised that the Earth Police
tolerate such behaviour - or do they not bother policing Earth itself?
Captain Button
>>>From: lal_truckee lal_t...@my-deja.com
>>
>>>I remember (possible inaccurately) that the City with Two Names, Twice
>>>was actually just Manhatten.
> Which raises a small point. From Ch 2 of ALFtS it seems that the spindizzy
> field is spherical.
> Afaicr we are never told the dimensions of Scranton-in-Flight, but let's
> assume (conservatively I suspect) that it is a circle of one mile radius from
> the city centre. This means that when it takes off it leaves behind a crater
> two miles across, and one mile deep in the middle.
> I wouldn't want to be a property owner anwhere nearby - the problems with
> subsidence could be fairly major. And I'm a bit surprised that the Earth Police
> tolerate such behaviour - or do they not bother policing Earth itself?
This is assuming that the center of the spindizzy field is at ground
level. I'm too lazy to to the geometry, but if you put the center
well above ground level and made the field appropriately larger, you
would have the same amount of land but a much shallower dome of
bedrock underneath. Probably make it easier to land, and to deal
with the locals who don't want to climb a mile-high mountain.
After takeoff, you can reconfigure the field so that is smaller
with the center at ground level (in the city's frame or reference).
--
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in
tolerance and free speech," - David Brin
Captain Button - but...@io.com
Michael S. Schiffer
>>From: Mitch Wagner mwa...@TheWorld.com
>...
>>But you don't HAVE to be convicted of some evil thing to get the
>>death penalty in "Cities in Flight" New York. All it takes is for
>>the City Fathers to think that it's good for the city that you be
>>dead.
>They could of course simply order you put off at the next port of
>call - sort of "We want you off" instead of "I want off" - but I
>suppose if that meant losing access to anti-agathics it might be
>viewed as just the death sentence in another form.
IIRC, Crispin is told that the city never withdraws the anti-agathics
from a citizen, because for anything that would rate that, it's easier
for the City Fathers to shoot the perp. (Retroactive foreshadowing?)
By implication, they probably don't normally maroon people either.
(Though they could presumably trade out milder troublemakers under the
rule of discretion, if they can find another city to take them.)
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
Harry Erwin
Is it deterministic if it can't be predicted much before it happens?
(cf. chaos theory)
Mitch Wagner
says...
> I remember (possible inaccurately) that the City with Two Names, Twice
> was actually just Manhatten.
Manhattan from the South Street Seaport up to and including Central
Park, which is to say that the Okie city of New York was only about half
of Manhattan.
> Which itself has a current population
> orders of magnitude greater than 5000, so your point would still be
> valid. However, IIRC earth cities, at the time the Okie City's launched
> themselves, were pretty sorry places: it's unclear to me if current
> population levels were aboard at launch.
I wonder whether the city was in pretty sorry shape when it launched, or
if the City Fathers saw the inevitable and got out while the decline was
just beginning.
SBMC
> Is it deterministic if it can't be predicted much before it happens?
>
Sure. Just because something is pre-determined doesn't mean everyone
is capable of seeing it coming.
Johnny1A
In order for the City society to function, it would still have to be a
fairly rare occurence. Otherwise, paranoia would freeze the City, and
nullify initiative.
I suspect that the 'egregious violation' was probably pretty severe,
and I further suspect that the Mayor and City Manager are probably
held to harder standards than the common Citizens of NY NY.
Shermanlee
Jim Cambias
<mwa...@TheWorld.com> wrote:
> In article <3C571952...@my-deja.com>, lal_t...@my-deja.com
> says...
>
> > I remember (possible inaccurately) that the City with Two Names, Twice
> > was actually just Manhatten.
>
> Manhattan from the South Street Seaport up to and including Central
> Park, which is to say that the Okie city of New York was only about half
> of Manhattan.
>
Are you sure of that? I thought it was simply Manhattan Island in toto.
Some of the Uptown sections may have been rezoned for industry (something
distinctly lacking in downtown New York).
> > Which itself has a current population
> > orders of magnitude greater than 5000, so your point would still be
> > valid. However, IIRC earth cities, at the time the Okie City's launched
> > themselves, were pretty sorry places: it's unclear to me if current
> > population levels were aboard at launch.
>
> I wonder whether the city was in pretty sorry shape when it launched, or
> if the City Fathers saw the inevitable and got out while the decline was
> just beginning.
Earth's cities probably were in a Depression-style slump (which would be
all too familiar to Blish and his readers) but I don't think they would be
reduced to the population of small towns. They seem to be able to field
substantial "police" forces and maintain specialists, so call it maybe
50,000+ for most Okie towns, 100,000 for NYC.
Cambias
mike stone
>
>Earth's cities probably were in a Depression-style slump (which would be
>all too familiar to Blish and his readers) but I don't think they would be
>reduced to the population of small towns. They seem to be able to field
>substantial "police" forces and maintain specialists, so call it maybe
>50,000+ for most Okie towns, 100,000 for NYC.
In which case Frad Haskins was _way_ off in his estimate (see my previous
message on this)
Mitch Wagner
cam...@SPAHMTRAP.heliograph.com says...
> In article <MPG.16c208069...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>, Mitch Wagner
> <mwa...@TheWorld.com> wrote:
>
> > In article <3C571952...@my-deja.com>, lal_t...@my-deja.com
> > says...
> >
> > > I remember (possible inaccurately) that the City with Two Names, Twice
> > > was actually just Manhatten.
> >
> > Manhattan from the South Street Seaport up to and including Central
> > Park, which is to say that the Okie city of New York was only about half
> > of Manhattan.
> >
> Are you sure of that?
Nope, not a bit.
Mitch Wagner
sherm...@hotmail.com says...
Yup.
Someone else suggested that Crispin deFord might have been simply put
off the next planet.
However, if you're in business and you've really, REALLY pissed off a
client, which is more likely to mollify him: "That action was taken by
an employee acting independently, without the sanction of the company,
and he's been fired" or "That action was taken by an employee acting
independently, without the sanction of the company, and he's been shot
by a firing squad. See here in this box which my assistant just brought
me, and which I am now handing over to you? That's his head, hands and
ears."
William December Starr
tho...@underbase.org (Phillip Thorne) said:
> Jump to 32cen in _A Life for the Stars_ (1962). While watching
> Scranton prepare to depart, 16-year-old CRISPIN DEFORD is impressed
> by the city.
"Wow," thought Crispin to himself. "That's one impressive city!"
(Sorry.)
-- William December Starr <wds...@panix.com>
Joseph Nebus
>>>From: lal_truckee lal_t...@my-deja.com
>>
>>>I remember (possible inaccurately) that the City with Two Names, Twice
>>>was actually just Manhatten.
>Which raises a small point. From Ch 2 of ALFtS it seems that the spindizzy
>field is spherical.
New York In Flight is just the County of New York, that is, the
island of Manhattan. Raising (to me) the question of whether Brooklyn,
Queens, et al are in flight as well. We know Budapest lifted as if it
were one city.
Also, New York was one of the oldest lifted cities -- that's made
clear in the Okie Jungle (did Blish resist calling it the City Jungle?),
where Amalfi could pull rank by virtue of the town's size and age in
flight. It had multiple spindizzies; possibly this would allow for a more
complex geometry. Or for it to lift Manhattan over, swoop down on the
Adirondacks somewhere, and take what it needs for a spherical space-going
city.
> Afaicr we are never told the dimensions of Scranton-in-Flight, but let's
>assume (conservatively I suspect) that it is a circle of one mile radius from
>the city centre. This means that when it takes off it leaves behind a crater
>two miles across, and one mile deep in the middle.
>I wouldn't want to be a property owner anwhere nearby - the problems with
>subsidence could be fairly major. And I'm a bit surprised that the Earth
>Police tolerate such behaviour - or do they not bother policing Earth
>itself?
There weren't any major property owners anywhere nearby, though.
The folks living near the area either sold their property or were impressed
into the city's services. And Earth, well, it *was* economically depressed
and almost negligible except as ancestral home -- the "sleepy backwater
capital of the Galaxy," an odd but I'm sure not unprecedented confluence.
Very likely the economic benefits of having its cities going to all the
inhabited worlds (and there are such; that's made clear in "Cities In
Flight") outweigh the sedimental problems.
It's also my recollection, although it could be borrowed from the
bits of spindizzy fields Blish used in the Trek novelizations, that the
smaller one's spindizzy field, the faster one can go -- so you can travel
the galaxy much more comfortably in a City, but it'll take forever to get
there. Or you can ride a little two-man cruiser and get to the Magelleanic
Clouds in a year, but it'd be like taking a cross-country trip in a packed
VW Bug. No wonder the Earth Cops hate the Okies; they're forced to ride
in Gemini capsules for months, and all they get for the trouble is to see
Wilkes-Barre about an undocumented oil field. And not even to go into
town.
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Course, for Wilkes-Barre, that may be the better... ah, but I kid
Pennsylvania.
James Nicoll
Joseph Nebus <neb...@rpi.edu> wrote:
>
>
> It's also my recollection, although it could be borrowed from the
>bits of spindizzy fields Blish used in the Trek novelizations, that the
>smaller one's spindizzy field, the faster one can go -- so you can travel
>the galaxy much more comfortably in a City, but it'll take forever to get
>there. Or you can ride a little two-man cruiser and get to the Magelleanic
>Clouds in a year, but it'd be like taking a cross-country trip in a packed
>VW Bug. No wonder the Earth Cops hate the Okies; they're forced to ride
>in Gemini capsules for months, and all they get for the trouble is to see
>Wilkes-Barre about an undocumented oil field. And not even to go into
>town.
Exact opposite, I think: bigger the ship, the faster the ship and
I think efficiency went up as well. He was right quick, as you may recall
and run off NYNY's spindizzies.
The Earth Police used enormously wasteful small ships, but
military or quasimilitary forces are not primarily driven by efficiency.
--
"Don't worry. It's just a bunch of crazies who believe in only one
god. They're just this far away from atheism."
Wayne & Schuster
Michael S. Schiffer
<nebusj.1...@cartesian.math.rpi.edu>:
>...
>There weren't any major property owners anywhere nearby, though.
>The folks living near the area either sold their property or were
>impressed into the city's services. And Earth, well, it *was*
>economically depressed and almost negligible except as ancestral
>home -- the "sleepy backwater capital of the Galaxy," an odd but
>I'm sure not unprecedented confluence. Very likely the economic
>benefits of having its cities going to all the inhabited worlds
>(and there are such; that's made clear in "Cities In Flight")
>outweigh the sedimental problems.
Though picking a landing site for the city is also non-trivial, it
occurs to me. Not impossible, if you aren't sentimental about messing
up a few dozen square miles of desert, but potentially disruptive.
>It's also my recollection, although it could be borrowed from the
>bits of spindizzy fields Blish used in the Trek novelizations,
>that the smaller one's spindizzy field, the faster one can go ...
I would have sworn that it was the opposite-- that bigger spindizzy
fields go faster. IIRC, that was an issue with He (where they were
thrown clear of the galaxy with it and had to work their way back more
slowly) and Hern VI (where they went off the march, spent months
setting things up, then careened through the galaxy in violation of
all speed limits to rendezvous with the march-- and the Vegan orbital
fort-- in Sol System).
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
Nyrath the nearly wise
> It's also my recollection, although it could be borrowed from the
> bits of spindizzy fields Blish used in the Trek novelizations, that the
> smaller one's spindizzy field, the faster one can go -- so you can travel
> the galaxy much more comfortably in a City, but it'll take forever to get
> there.
Alas, that turns out not to be the case.
The spindizzies work on gravity. The more gravity,
the more efficienly it works.
This is why they bothered to use entire cities as ships.
Ships don't have much mass, so they are slow.
Citys have more mass, so they are faster.
Planets have most of all. This is why it took
New York years to cross the distance that the planet
He covered in a few seconds.
mike stone
>The spindizzies work on gravity. The more gravity,
> the more efficienly it works.
>
> This is why they bothered to use entire cities as ships.
>
> Ships don't have much mass, so they are slow.
> Citys have more mass, so they are faster.
> Planets have most of all. This is why it took
> New York years to cross the distance that the planet
> He covered in a few seconds.
Indeed this is my perennial problem with the whole concept. If all these things
are true, then why stop at cities?
Even if it is impractical to confiscate Earth-size planets, there must be loads
of decent sized asteroids or moons (iirc Hern VI was one such) which their
"native" solar systems wouldn't greatly miss, and which would move fast enough
for their riders to get anywhere in the Galaxy (or even beyond) without having
to worry about starving on the way
Talking of food, that raises another point. Rather than just taking the city,
wouldn't it make more sense to carry off a few hundred sq miles of farmland as
well? This solves a lot of food problems, and saves the local farmers from
losing their market. After all, the Depression is probably hitting them as
well, so they may be just as willing to leave as the townies are - esp if they
get to take their land with them. The extra mass also increases the city's
cruising speed
Rather than Okie cities, I gat a mental picture of Okie _asteroids_ - a bit
like the "terraformed rocks" of Williamson's "Seetee" universe, or Poul's
"Flying Mountain" or "Makeshift Rocket" ones. They travel from star to star,
and on arrival the city takes off from the Asteroid to land on the planet they
are visiting - acting more like a "gig" or "lifeboat" than an independent
vehicle
Sorry if I seem to be continually knocking this series. I don't mean it that
way. I find the spindizzy a wonderful concept and it breaks my heart that it
ain't real. I just feel there were so many angles to it that Blish could have
explored and didn't
At the risk of seeming a carping critic (I love the
Joseph Nebus
>Joseph Nebus wrote:
>> It's also my recollection, although it could be borrowed from the
>> bits of spindizzy fields Blish used in the Trek novelizations, that the
>> smaller one's spindizzy field, the faster one can go -- so you can travel
>> the galaxy much more comfortably in a City, but it'll take forever to get
>> there.
> Alas, that turns out not to be the case.
> The spindizzies work on gravity. The more gravity,
> the more efficienly it works.
Yes, yes, I blew it. I was putting stuff he used for a battle
sequence in "Spock Must Die!", where he turned spindizzies into the warp
fields, into the "Cities In Flight" continuity. I'd like to blame it on
Blish's tendency to have second, third, fourth, and fifth thoughts about
all his ideas and put them out in print, never mind what happens to the
mutual consistency of ideas, but I just messed up.
I still think the cops having to travel halfway across the galaxy
only to end up in Albany, New York, is a good reason for their otherwise
not fully explained hostility to the Okie cities.
(At least a part of why I am hopelessly infatuated with Blish's
writing, even the bad parts, is that he does come up with worlds that
seem to have more stories left in them, and I'm usually left wanting more.
One might argue that the definitive story completely uses up all of the
potential of its background, but that doesn't seem right -- there *isn't*
just one story that could do everything possible with the Cities in Flight
premise, or the pantropy one, or the "Beep" world, but a collection may
get at most of them.)
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
rhadki...@gmail.com
Btw, this single point, killing Deford, pisses me off supremely! An entire novel dedicated to hus development to have him killed off in a single sentence. Smh
Robert A. Woodward
<c4daf639-1de1-407e...@googlegroups.com>,
the 4 to be written), see
<http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?15721>. BTW, the ISFDB doesn't
state explicitly that _Earthman, Come Home_ is a fixup of stories
written in the early 1950s. IIRC, _They Shall Have Stars_ is also a
fixup.
--
Robert Woodward <robe...@drizzle.com>
<http://robertaw.drizzlehosting.com>
A.G.McDowell
> My question is, "How old was Deford when the city father's had him shot?"
>
> Btw, this single point, killing Deford, pisses me off supremely! An entire novel dedicated to hus development to have him killed off in a single sentence. Smh
Flight for sentimental reasons recently. I got derailed because it was
easier to read from my Kindle where I was, but I have read enough to
convince myself yet again that Cities in Flight is not appreciated
anything like enough as one of the great feats of Space Opera and
universe-building. They Shall Have Stars is eerily prescient in some
ways, A Life For The Stars is a great coming of age story (even if we
don't meet DeFord again), Earthman Come Home, is a great novel of
political conflict, and The Triumph of Time - apart from showcasing
perhaps the ultimate change of scale to encompass the fate of the entire
Universe - has one of my favourite lines about the triumph of scientific
fact over political argument:
Amalfi.. the time for forensics is past. This question does not have two
sides, except for the right side and the wrong side, and we are going to
have to shuck you off as a brilliant advocate for the wrong side. You
have done your magnificent best, but since the right side does not need
an advocate, you have been wasting your breath. (end quote)
Gods of all stars! You even have a somewhat bonkers sociological theory
running through it - Spenglerism - which, to top it all off, actually
exists. What more could you possibly want?
DeFord is 16 at the beginning of A Life For The Stars. The closest thing
I can see for a date is the last date in his history lesson, the
poisoning of Alois Hrunta in 3089. Earthman, Come Home says that he was
shot by the City Fathers around 3300 (for engineering an egregious
violation of the city's contract with a planet called Epoch). So he was
born no earlier than 3073, and was no older than 227. Based on the tone
of the history lesson, I'd guess that he was maybe 30 years younger than
this.