Talk:James Blish

message: Does so much space need to be devoted to these stories here?  It's stuck in the middle of the biography section.  The article is supposed to be about a prolific author, not about two short novels he wrote somewhere in the middle of his career. 12.22.250.4 18:35, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: ''[[Black Easter]]''/''[[The Day After Judgement]]''

message: Blish is said in the Arrowhead SF article to have been married to Virginia Kidd, the literary agent.  The only wife mentioned here is fellow science fiction author J. A. Lawerence.  Doesn't some mention of divorce and remarriage need to come in here?  I don't want to turn Wikipedia into some sort of trashy tabloid, but isn't this a material fact that needs to be covered?  Rlquall 12:39, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The Virginia Kidd article says they were married 1947 to 1963. -- Beardo 03:58, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Blish's personal life 

message: The 'SF Masterworks' collection gives the year 4104 for the end of the universe, which makes the text concerning 4004 vague and potentially misleading.
I do not have knowledge of earlier editions, but perhaps someone more knowledgable could expand the section to give citations relating to a specific edition including the earlier date. Retrograde 01:02, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The paperback edition gave 4004. This was, I suspect, an intentional allusion to the traditional date, based on Bishop Ussher's chronology, for the creation of the Earth (4004 BC), a date noted in many annotations of the Bible. DES (talk) 15:51, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Works - Cities in Flight 

message: The first story's main character is named "Steele", at least in the german translation. Somebody changed the name to "Sweeney" in the article though. I suspect that this is the name given to him in the english text then? Can somebody confirm/check this? 84.187.236.130 21:34, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Pantropy

message: Yes, it's Sweeney in the English (presumably original) version.
NOTE ON CITIES ON FLIGHT: When referring to the novels as first, second, etc, the writer is referring to the internal chronology, not the order of publication.  The order of publication was III, I, IV, II.  One jarring result is that the sympathetic hero of II is casually killed off at the beginning of III, though what really happened was that Blish took a minor name from III and built an important character around it.
CharlesTheBold 04:56, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reply to Pantropy; chronology 

message: I undid a change to the article that said:
* Spock Must Die! (1970) The second original Star Trek novel.
The text in both this article (James Blish) and the Spock Must Die! article both state that it was the first original SF novel.  SO, if you are going to change this information here, you should change it in both places and cite your source on the information please. 
Thanks.  David Reiss (talk) 14:41, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Spock Must Die! is an ungodly mess in need of serious attention, so that's not a good example.  However, both articles state that the novel is the first original novel "for adult readers", as Mission to Horatius (published years earlier) was a junior novel. Rhindle The Red (talk) 14:13, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Mission to Horatius was marketed as a "Young adult" novel, but was IMO no more "junior" than many of the franchised Star Trek novels later marketed to adults. But it was not part of the later series, and has remained obscure to many fans. DES (talk) 15:47, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spock must die 

message: Blish's The Triumph of Time was the first serious science fiction I read as a kid.  Later, I got the single-volume Cities in Flight tetralogy and read it straight through.
I just caught this fascinating article about anti-matter in today's paper:A baffling question is why the universe consists almost entirely of matter and not anti-matter. Scientists think that both substances were created in equal measure at the big bang. "Where is all the anti-matter in the universe?" UC Santa Barbara physicist Benjamin Monreal asked. He speculated that it may be hiding in anti-matter galaxies, even in unseen anti-matter universes.
It was an Aha! moment for me, because back in 1958, James Blish was ruminating on this very subject in 'The Triumph of Time'.  The story is about the our universe's encounter with its "anti-matter evil twin," and their mutual annihilation and whether we could survive the catastrophe.  This, to me, is science fiction at its purest.  It is perhaps the ultimate science fiction because it deals with the ultimate event.
Though written in the late fifties and early sixties, Blish's epic transcends in subject and scope some of the technology in it, which we now regard today as quaint artifacts.  But the basic ideas, anti-matter machines used to propel whole cities through deep space, and parallel matter-anit-matter universes, are taken quite seriously 60 years later, by today's scientists and futurists, as the article makes clear.  Its headline, Scientists harness anti-matter, ordinary matter's 'evil twin,' is a great tribute to the memory of James Blish.
J M Rice (talk) 23:04, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  An appreciation 

message: There was a no-headline mess at the top of this page that was pretty incomprehensible, and in any case messed up the page.  It had something to do with hairsplitting about English and American spelling and the letter "e".  If the author(s) thinks it's important, please place it in the normal sequence of entries, accompanied by a heading. J M Rice (talk) 23:18, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deleted extraneous talk 

message: An IP added and then removed the following text:
:As a scientific researcher at the Tobacco Institute, Blish did make contributions to the sciences in terms of microbiology, which was his speciality. However, his most significant contribution to the sciences was the coining of the term 'Gas Giant' for Jovian and Saturnian planets. As part of a short story, the term quickly found acceptance and widespread use among astronomers and astrophysicists, and is a term in common use today.
If this can be cited it seems well worth including. DES (talk) 00:28, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scientific contributions 

message: I had never realised how short Blish's life was; in fact the article's information about him as a person is sparse. As yet another reader who had been influenced by Blish's writing in my schooldays, I doubt that I am the first to wonder about more in his life. Is much known? Is the exclusion of more detail for lack of citable material? For example, was his death accident, heart, cancer... etc?  The article doesn't even mention that he was a microbiologist. I don't mean this as sniping at the authors and editors to date and have no idea where to search for more information myself, but does anyone have suggestions for more material or citable sources?  JonRichfield 
PS: I have just gone on a brief surfing after more info and found some useful items in the online SF encyclopedia . Would there be objections to including some of the items from there, suitably cited and paraphrased?
(talk) 14:31, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  The end?

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on James Blish. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130521070009/http://www.midamericon.org/halloffame/ to http://www.midamericon.org/halloffame/
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 21:58, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Currently, at various points the article states, 
These are mutually contradictory. Does the Dirac radio form part of The Seedling Stars Pantropy 'verse or doesn't it? Is the "anomaly" referred to in the third quote endemic to Blish's writings or just in the mind of some OR-minded Wikipedian? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 11:00, 30 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dirac vs Pantropy 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on James Blish. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20121016200358/http://locusmag.com/SFAwards/Db/NomLit14.html to http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/Db/NomLit14.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 11:36, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified