James Blish
May 23, 1921 - July 29, 1975
Brilliant
writer
who received a BA in microbiology at Rutgers in 1942. WWII got in the
way and Blish was drafted immediately after graduation and served until
1944 as a medical technician. After the war, Blish resumed his studies
at Columbia for two years and during this period joined the Futurians.
Virginia Kidd, Blish's first wife and literary agent, was also a
member.
After
schooling,
Blish entered the literary field with several agency and trade related
jobs. Blish maintained a day job, writing in his spare time, always
thinking of himself as a SF writer. By 1967, he had written 27 books,
outstanding among them was A Case of Conscience and the Cities
in Flight series, and 175 pieces of various kinds. An early short
story stood out, 1952's "Surface Tension," about life in the microcosm
of a water world.
In
his final years
Blish became a major contributor to the Star Trek saga, both by
re-writing numerous scripts into anthologies, and contributing his own
original stories and screenplays including Spock Must Die!.
Other
interests
were cats, concert music, amateur theatricals, and private flying.
Blish's papers and manuscript s have been reposited at Oxford
University's Bodleian Library.
Series
After
Such Knowledge
Dr.
Mirabilis
Wayne
Barlowe |
Black Easter/Day After Judgement
Wayne Barlowe
|
A
Case of Conscience
Darrell
K Sweet |
Dr. Mirablis
This
is the strange, compelling story of Roger Bacon. Ambitious,
impatient, mutinous, Bacon was a man of his times with a vision
reaching far beyond even our own day. Subject to the harsh, narrow
confines of Church-dominated "science", Bacon dared to venture into the
deep waters of theory, risking deadly accusations of heresy and black
magic. Against a vividly realised backdrop of thirteenth-century
England, Paris and Rome, James Blish wrote an engrossing account of
this lonely prophet and suspected sorcerer.
Black Easter
A
gripping story about primal evil: a sinister intermingling of
power,politics, modern theology, the dark forces of necromancy, and
what proves, all too terribly, not to be superstition.
A Case of
Conscience
Father
Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez is part of a four-man
scientific mission to the planet Lithia, there to study a harmonious
society of aliens living in paradise. But how can these perfect beings
have no perception of God or sin? If such a paradise has been created
apart from God, then who is responsible?
Cities in Flight
They Shall Have Stars/2018!
Chris Foss
|
A Life For the Stars
Paul Lehr
|
Earthman, Come Home
Chris Foss
|
The Triumph of Time/A Clash of Cymbals
Chris
Foss
|
Cities
in Flight (Onimbus)
David
Mattingly |
Cities in
Flight (Onimbus)
John
Harris
|
They Shall Have Stars/2018!
2018
AD. The Cold Peace, worse even than the Cold War. The bureaucratic
regimes which rule from Washington and Moscow are indistinguishable in
their passion for total repression. But in the West, a few dedicated
individuals still struggle to find a way out of the trap of human
history. Behind the screen of official research their desperate project
is nearing completion.
Bridge
At Death's End
( includes a Chronology of
Cities in Flight
)
A Life For the Stars
The
earth's cities abandon the worn-out planet, hurtling off into the
depths of space.
Earthman,
Come Home
When
the cities left Earth, they exchanged a simple environment for one
of constant, sometimes shattering change. The Universe was littered
with cultures in every conceivable stage of development. Only the iron
hand of the germanium-backed economy and occasional interventions by
the Earth police imposed some kind of order on the spaceways. Even John
Amalfi never got used to the life - and he had been mayor of New York
for nearly five hundred years now.
Bindlestiff
Earthman,
Come Home
Okie
Sargasso of Lost
Cities
Triumph of Time
In
three years' time the two universes were doomed to inevitable,
catastrophic collision! When the scientists of the wandering planet,
journeying through inter-galactic space, heard the sound of hydrogen
atoms coming into existence out of nothing, they realized that they had
accidentally discovered the birthplace of continuous creation. They had
lifted the curtain and caught an instant's glimpse of the unknowable.
But to have looked it full in the face could have been no more
fatal, for later, much later, they were to learn that t hey had also
uncovered mankind's Day of Judgment!
Star Dwellers
The Star Dwellers
Paul Lehr
|
Mission to the Heart Stars
Wayne Barlowe
|
The Star Dwellers
The
inhabitants of Terra nicknamed them "Angels".They were exquisitely
beautiful, these shimmering, fiery creatures , highly intelligent and
playful. Yet they were awesome, too, considering that the youngest were
four million years old, and the oldest had probably participated in the
First Cause, which had given birth to the whole universe. To young
space cadet Jack Loftus fell the overwhelming responsibility of
negotiating a treaty with them--a treaty which could mean the life or
death of earth and mankind.
Mission to the Heart
Stars
Past
worlds almost too strange to describe, three men hurtle into the
dark uncharted mystery of space. Their task: to make contact with the
hegemony of malis, the unknown force that was watching their solar
system and had been since the beginning of recorded history. On their
success or failure depends the entire future of the earth.
Novels
Jack
of Eagles
1952
Chris
Foss |
The Warriors of Day
Calle
|
Vor |
Titan's Daughter
Rowena Morrill
|
Night Shapes
|
Welcome to Mars
Peter Elson
|
The Vanished Jet
|
Quincunx of Time
Chris Foss |
Jack of Eagles(exp of
Let the Finder Beware)
Danny
Caiden's on the run--from the FBI, the SEC, the Justice
Department, and the Mob. Only recently, Danny had been an average New
York copywriter, until he suddenly found he had ESP. His knowledge of
the future is astonishing, and the rest of Danny's powers are just
beginning. But someone else wants him too: an evil group of
preternatural men bent on world domination. They'll stop at nothing
until they capture Danny..or destroy him. Why? Becuase only Danny has
the power to sabotage their diabolic tyranny. In the final, frenzied
battle, Danny must summon all his powers, or sacrifice himself--and all
mankind--to satanic slavery forever.
The Warriors of
Day (aka Sword
of Xota)
Tipton
Bond was a man who lived for challenges-and Earth had no more
challenges for him.
But on Xota:
One of the giants' faces bent over him, sardonically benigh. "You are
an Eathman, little himan electron. You are a denizen of a planet which
the Warriors of Day will reach and engulf, in a bare thousand years.
Did you think to escape us by coming to Xota? You have brought
yourself closer to the thing which you thought to escape. You will
share in the general holocaust when the Wild Star arrives!"
Giants they might be, Bond decided but they had limitations.
The Frozen
Year(aka Fallen
Star in UK)
VOR (w
Damon Knight)
Beings
of unthinkable fury assault the earth with their terrible might!
Seven million degrees of infernal fury -- The glowing, compact ovoid
plummeted downward, the whole sky screaming like a metallic banshee as
the air boiled away from its sides. A supersonic Bang broke over the
forest, but the thing was already glid ing in among the tress. The
curious centerboard glided down--earth fountained away from it like
water--and all the forest burst into flame! Then a thin black line
etched a perfect circle on the side o f the metal egg--the circle
thickened into a door or airlock--the air was rent by a searing,
screaming hiss, & suddenly--The strange being--soon to be known to
all mankind as VOR---emerged.
The
Duplicated Man(w Robert A.
W. Lowndes)
Paul
Danto was a member of a subversive political party which had an
answer: make peace with Venus. But the only way to peace was through
the overthrow of Security. And Danton had found the one weapon which
would make Security's fall possible: the long-forgotten duplication
machine. It had been well forgotten, for a machine which could make up
to five duplicates of any living person was too dangerous to have
around. But now, what if the top members of Security were kidnaped
briefly, and then, suddenly, there were five of each?
And All
the Stars a Stage
Titan's
Daughter (w Virginia
Kidd)
With
her lay the destruction--or the fulfillment--of the human race.
Goddess.or Freak? Aside from being eight feet tall, blonde blue-eyed
Sena was unusually beautiful--and extraordinarily unusual. She was a
Tetra, one of the handful of people belonging to the super-race
genetically engineered by Dr. Hyatt of Dunhill University. Sena and
her Tetra lover Sam attended Dunhill and did their best to ignore the
sneers of the "normal" humans, who hated them for their incredible
strengths and mental abilities. But the resentment of the "normals"
gets to Maurey, the most brilliant Tetra, and he plots a diabolic
plan to overpower the human race. Suddenly, Sena is caught in a deadly
triangle with Sam and Maurey that might mean the end of the Tetras and
the world around them.
The Night
Shapes
Welcome to
Mars!
Dolph
Haertel had made history. His discovery of an anti-gravity drive
had won him the race to be the first man to set foot on Mars. But now
he was marooned, missing a vital spare part, and hoping that the one
person to whom he'd revealed the secret of the drive could reach him in
time.
The
Vanished Jet
The
Quincunx of Time
Earth
is Queen of the Universe, but someone is trying to destroy her.By
shattering time forever! Travel at light speeds is common, & Earth
is first in the universe, reigning over many worlds. But in order to
rule effectively, Captain Robin Weinbaum, head of Security, needed an
extremely advanced communications s ystem. He got it w/the Dirac
transmitter, the first machine capable of sending instantaneous
messages anywhere in the universe. The only problem was that someone
called J. Shelby Stevens had a machine that could do the
impossible--tap the transmissions before they were even made! It was
Weinbaum's job to find Stevens. And unless he did, time would be
abolished & the universe closed to Earth forever!
