James Blish

James Blish (born May 23, 1921, East Orange, New Jersey, U.S.—died July 30, 1975, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England) was an American author and critic of science fiction best known for the Cities in Flight series (1950–62) and the novel A Case of Conscience (1958). His work, which often examined philosophical ideas, was part of the more sophisticated science fiction that arose in the 1950s.

Blish had been a fan of science fiction since his childhood, and his first short story, “Emergency Refueling,” was published in Super Science Stories in 1940. He received a bachelor’s degree in zoology from Rutgers University in 1942 and served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1944. After his discharge he attended graduate school at Columbia University but left in 1946 without completing a degree. He worked mainly in public relations writing advertising copy until 1968, when he was able to turn to the writing of fiction full-time.

Beginning in 1950, Blish wrote the short stories that became the first published novel of the Cities in Flight series, Earthman, Come Home (1955), set in the 4th millennium ce, which established the future world that would be the setting of the four-part series. Explicitly based on the historical theories of German philosopher Oswald Spengler about the life cycle of a culture, Cities in Flight spans 2,000 years of history. Earthman, Come Home is set in New York City, which travels among the stars using an antigravity drive, the “spindizzy.” A prequel, They Shall Have Stars (1956), is about the invention of the spindizzy amid the decline of Western civilization in the early 21st century. A new interstellar civilization emerges in A Life for the Stars (1962) when Earth’s cities use the spindizzies to escape their home planet. The series culminates in The Triumph of Time (1958) with the end of the universe and the birth of new universes in 4004.

In A Case of Conscience a Jesuit priest and biologist studying the idyllic planet of Lithia comes to believe that Lithia and its reptilian inhabitants are creations of Satan designed to undermine humanity’s faith in God. A Case of Conscience won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1959 and was part of a thematically connected series called After Such Knowledge—from a line in T.S. Eliot’s poem “Gerontion” (1920), “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”—that examined the competition between religion and science. The other novels in the series included Doctor Mirabilis (1964), a historical novel about the 13th-century English philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon, and two novels that Blish considered as one work: Black Easter; or, Faust Aleph-Null (1968) and The Day After Judgement (1971), a fantasy in which Satan and his demons conquer Earth.

Blish was also one of the first critics of science fiction, and he judged it by the standards applied to “serious” literature. He took to task both his fellow authors for such deficiencies as bad grammar and the misunderstanding of scientific concepts and the magazine editors who accepted and published such poor material without editorial intervention. Much of his criticism was published in “fanzines” (amateur publications written by science fiction fans) in the 1950s under the pseudonym William Atheling, Jr., and was collected in The Issue at Hand (1964) and More Issues at Hand (1970).

Blish moved to England in 1969. Much of the remainder of his career was devoted to writing 12 collections of short stories based on the episodes of the American television series Star Trek (1966–69), which Blish felt had greatly expanded the audience for science fiction.