Sign in with Facebook
Kevin Rubin's Reviews > Cities in Flight
Cities in Flight (Cities in Flight, #1-4)
by
by
"Cities in Flight" is hard science fiction, with hard science, chemical formulas and mathematical equations tossed in to clarify concepts the characters talk about. It's four related stories. One thing to remember while reading this is, it was written before Sputnik.
The first begins in the early 21st century, with the Soviet Union subtly winning the cold war by "sovietizing" the west, that is, the west is so secretive now, it's behaving like everything they're fighting in the Soviet Union. One rebellious, but powerful senator organizes a lot of scientific and engineering research knowing that the west will collapse soon and opening up the stars for travel and colonization.
The research culminates in a biological compound to keep people from growing old and dying, and in an antigravity device to move objects in space, with a long, engineering and political name, but which everyone simply call spindizzies.
The second story opens up about 1100 years later, when whole cities pack up as space ships, using spindizzies, and take off as migrant workers to look for work out in other star systems.
The third story gives a bit of history of space flight and the science behind it. Blish does get some future predictions wrong (again, written before Sputnik) about how the Soviet Union was against space flight as then the unhappy people would leave.
Overall the third story was the weakest. It was like a bunch of episodes of Star Trek mashed together as mayor Amalfi leads the Okie city, New York, on various adventures, from one narrow escape from disaster to another. They were all over the galaxy and I found it incredibly hard to keep track of time and distance.
Some aspects felt very out of date now, in the early 21st century. For instance, now we're used to all large air craft having identifying signals, but in this space craft as large as New York City have nothing like it.
For now it was all too much and I didn't enjoy the 3rd story, so I'll skip the 4th and come back to it in a few months. The first two were definitely the strongest, good characters and good plots.
The first begins in the early 21st century, with the Soviet Union subtly winning the cold war by "sovietizing" the west, that is, the west is so secretive now, it's behaving like everything they're fighting in the Soviet Union. One rebellious, but powerful senator organizes a lot of scientific and engineering research knowing that the west will collapse soon and opening up the stars for travel and colonization.
The research culminates in a biological compound to keep people from growing old and dying, and in an antigravity device to move objects in space, with a long, engineering and political name, but which everyone simply call spindizzies.
The second story opens up about 1100 years later, when whole cities pack up as space ships, using spindizzies, and take off as migrant workers to look for work out in other star systems.
The third story gives a bit of history of space flight and the science behind it. Blish does get some future predictions wrong (again, written before Sputnik) about how the Soviet Union was against space flight as then the unhappy people would leave.
Overall the third story was the weakest. It was like a bunch of episodes of Star Trek mashed together as mayor Amalfi leads the Okie city, New York, on various adventures, from one narrow escape from disaster to another. They were all over the galaxy and I found it incredibly hard to keep track of time and distance.
Some aspects felt very out of date now, in the early 21st century. For instance, now we're used to all large air craft having identifying signals, but in this space craft as large as New York City have nothing like it.
For now it was all too much and I didn't enjoy the 3rd story, so I'll skip the 4th and come back to it in a few months. The first two were definitely the strongest, good characters and good plots.
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read
Cities in Flight.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
Finished Reading
November 11, 2012
– Shelved
