page_title: James Blish
section_title: Cities in Flight (1950–1958)
hierarchical_section_title: James Blish / Career / Cities in Flight (1950–1958)
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover, Two Complete Science Adventure Books, Spring 1953
context_page_description: James Benjamin Blish was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is best known for his Cities in Flight novels, and his series of Star Trek novelizations written with his wife, J. A. Lawrence. He is credited with creating the term "gas giant" to refer to large planetary bodies.
  Blish was a member of the Futurians. His first published stories appeared in Super Science Stories and Amazing Stories.
  Blish wrote literary criticism of science fiction using the pen name William Atheling Jr. His other pen names included Donald Laverty, John MacDougal, and Arthur Lloyd Merlyn.
context_section_description: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction asserts that it was not until the 1950s, and the Okie sequence of stories beginning their run, "did it become clear [Blish] would become a [science fiction] writer of unusual depth". The stories were loosely based on the Okie migration following the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and were influenced by Oswald Spengler's two-part Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West).
  The stories detail the life of the Okies, humans who migrate throughout space looking for work in vast city-ships, powered by spindizzies, a type of anti-gravity engine. The premise and plot reflected Blish's feelings on the state of western civilization, and his personal politics. The first two stories, "Okie", and "Bindlestiff", were published in 1950, by Astounding. "Sargasso of Lost Cities" appeared in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books in April 1953. "Earthman, Come Home" followed a few months later, published by Astounding. In 1955, Blish collected the four stories together into an omnibus titled Earthman, Come Home, published by Putnam.
  More stories followed: In 1956, They Shall Have Stars, which edited together "Bridge" and "At Death’s End", and in 1958, Blish published The Triumph of Time. Four years later, he published a new Okies novel, A Life for the Stars. The Okies sequence was edited together and published as Cities In Flight (1970).
  Clute notes, "the brilliance of Cities in Flight does not lie in the assemblage of its parts, but in the momentum of the ideas embodied in it (albeit sometimes obscurely)."
caption: The novella Sargasso of Lost Cities, Blish's third Cities in Flight story, was published in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books in 1953.
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