Quote:
Originally Posted by Elsi
HowGozit reminded me of James Blish's Cities in Flight trilogy. Spectacular.
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Tetralogy, actually:
They Shall Have Stars
A Life for the Stars
Earthman, Come Home
The Triumph of Time
The macguffin is the Spindizzy field, which can enclose an object and drive it faster than light. The more mass a Spindizzy has to work with, the better it does, and there's no reason you can't enclose an entire city in a Spindizzy field and launch it into the galaxy. That's precisely what happens, as whole cities leave an economically depressed Earth to look for work in the galaxy.
I have to love a series where the city of New York is a major character.
While the books have a common theme and setting, they aren't exactly a series, and have significant stylistic differences between them. Blish was one of the most literate SF writers of his period, and a writer I've thought underrated. (He did a regular column of SF criticism for one of the magazines, collected in two Advent volumes called "The Issue at Hand" and "More Issues at Hand", where he tried to do the first serious technical criticism of SF short stories. The collections are still worth reading, 40+ years later.)
I met Blish, many years ago, but didn't get the chance to ask him how the records were preserved, since The Triumph of Time ends with the death of our universe, and is supposedly written from the perspective of a scholar in the next.
But yes, spectacular, and a series I expect to see on any shelf of SF classics.
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Dennis