blish

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/The Devil's Day
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 (Omnibus)
David Mattingly

Cities in Flight (Omnibus)
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!

"Oakie Cities"
John Harris

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/ESP er
Chris Foss

Duplicated Man
w/Robert Lowndes

The Warriors of Day
Paul Calle

The Frozen Year/Fallen Star
Chris Foss

Vor

Titan's Daughter
Rowena Morrill

Night Shapes
Chris Foss

And all the Stars a Stage
Wayne Barlowe

Welcome to Mars
Peter Elson

The Vanished Jet
Judith Ann Lawrence

Quincunx of Time
Chris Foss

Jack of Eagles/ESP er
(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)
It was the greatest scientific discovery of the century---but who would believe it?
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

When the Sun explodes... all life will end. No one will survive the blow-up; except the men and women who crowd into a few starships and fly away into space whiel there is still time, to look for a new home in the infinite void, a new planet on which to settle. Jorn, unskilled, unemployed, seeming a reject from society, finds that he has what it takes to become one of the brave survivors, blasting off in hastily built ships that have never flown before. Jorn and his companions begin a long search, threatened by repeated disasters and despair, but ultimately leading through to an unexpected climax for which no one is prepared.

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

The continent lay before them, vast areas of it unexplored, its forests, plains, jungles and mountains teeming with forms of life unknown to modern man. Here the witch doctors reigned supreme, using their inexplicable and remarkable powers on men and beasts. The purpose of the safari was mysterious, its members an oddly assorted group of people, unlikely to have any same objective in common.

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

Many people were distressed when the United States' new experimental sub-orbital transport failed to land as scheduled at the Paris Air Show. But for 15 year old Stan Dorman, the news had special and terrible significance; his parents were aboard the plane.

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!