NYNY 2019: Two names twice.

 

“In return I owe you the answer; are you good at riddles?”
“Riddles?”
“Raetseln,” Amalfi translated.
“Oh—conundrums. No, but I can try.”
“What city has two names twice?”
Evidently Specht did not need to be good at riddles to come up with the answer to that one. His jaw dropped. “You’re N—” he began.”

James Blish, Earthman Come Home

Although it's only been a couple of years since our last visit, Karli and I are off to New York once again as of this coming weekend.   And, really, how could a return visit be a bad thing? Our first two-week visit barely scratched the surface of New York's vibrant historical, cultural, culinary and architectural presence - its status as one of the world's great cities is undeniably well deserved.

One of the more epic and well-known examples of New York as a science fiction setting is James Blish's epic Cities in Flight series, although, surprisingly, the series relies very little on the aspects of the Big Apple which have made it so justifiably famous.

The title of the series says it all:  a future in which Earth's cities have abandoned the planet to travel between the stars.

The underlying technology that makes this possible is the spindizzy -  mammoth gravity-controlling mechanisms that power and drive the cities' flight across the stars. The spindizzies allow for faster than light travel, but even then, transit between solar systems can take decades, which makes anti-aging drugs, or anti-agathics, one of the crucial resources of the migrant cities.

The series relies heavily on a varied selection of historical and cultural influences, and finds some of its inspiration in Spengler's Decline of the West and its analysis of the characteristics of different types of cultures - which sounds a bit intimidating, but the books are actually quite readable.

The series is made up of four novels: They Shall Have Stars, A Life For the Stars, Earthman, Come Home and The Triumph of Time (in chronological order).* 

They Shall Have Stars lays the groundwork for the other books: the creation of the first anti-agathics, and a massive research project on Jupiter that provides the data on gravity necessary for the development of the spindizzy, all conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue due to a repressive and totalitarian government, and finally resulting in an opportunity for escape to the freedom of the stars.

The second book, A Life For The Stars, is one of those traditional "teenage boy makes good" stories, which takes place over a thousand years later.  It starts on Earth following a global economic collapse, where relocating to space, "going Okie", in the parlance of the Dustbowl and the American Depression,  will hopefully offer a better alternative than a dead-end existence on an impoverished planet.  The 16-year old hero, Chris deFord**, is press ganged by the city of Scranton, PA as it prepares to leave Earth, but is eventually transferred to New York***, where he is adopted by a conveniently narrative couple, and enrolled in school in hopes of achieving citizenship and access to anti-agathics.

Although he seems to lack any skills that will earn him citizenship, even after endless rounds of education, deFord defuses a dangerous situation involving Scranton by analyzing the cultural analogies involved in the situation, and finally becomes the city's first cultural morphologist at the age of 18, under the job title of City Manager.

Earthman, Come Home, third in the series, is a collection of somewhat picaresque adventures on the part of New York and its immortal mayor, John Amalfi, made up of stand-alone stories that originally appeared in pulp magazines between 1950 and 1953 - a common publishing strategy at the time.

As laid out in A Life For the Stars, the economic model occupied by the travelling cities in Earthman, Come Home is that of depression-era migrant workers - the cities provide technological and industrial solutions to Earth's far-flung colonies for a fee, then move on to the next star system in hopes of finding more work and thereby staving off starvation.  The motto on this New York's City Hall is "Lady, mow your lawn?" and the stories borrow the terminology and mores of depression-era migrant workers:  good cities are hobos, tramp cities steal from their hosts, and bindlestiffs are cities that have gone rogue and prey upon other cities.

Throughout the various episodes that make up the book, Mayor Amalfi and Mark Hazelton, his current city manager, resolve the challenges facing the city by understanding and subverting the socio-political matrix of their opponents, based on analogies from other societies. In the final adventure, Amalfi saves Earth from a remnant of the defeated Vegan empire, then New York leaves the galaxy.

And the fourth book?  Time and space come to an end. And begin again: fiat lux, the end. (Or, presumably, the beginning.)

When I first read the series in my teen years, I was far less critical than I am now - I just took it all in. Re-reading the books now, I'm surprised that Blish chose Manhattan for his setting. Its primary claim to fame is as a port and trade centre, rather than being an industrial hub like Pittsburgh or Detroit - or Scranton, for that matter - and I feel that Manhattan would need to substantially up its game if it wanted to be competitive with other cities as an industrial resource.

I'm also a bit shocked by some of the solutions chosen by Mayor Amalfi, for whom the survival of the city outweighs all other concerns.  Amalfi makes some startlingly amoral decisions, such as using women as expendable bait to lure in a bindlestiff city, casually deploying fusion bombs to eliminate a small garrison, and callously hijacking a dying city without concern for its remaining inhabitants.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the series is that, other than a street name dropped here and there and the reputation attached to the city's name, Blish doesn't look very much at life in New York as such.

Over the course of the three books that deal with New York's voyages in space, there's surprisingly little detail about daily life as Manhattan travels between the stars. In A Life For the Stars, there's a brief reference to the rumble of the subways as they travel through the city's bedrock foundation, and Chris Ford's adoptive parents live in a conventional apartment, but Blish never looks at how everyday life in the city has altered in order to reflect its status as a hobo city-ship - even though "...the ship was a city, a city of jails and playgrounds, alleys and alley cats.”

Regardless, in my mind it's a sort of perpetual starlit summer night in Manhattan - bright lights, crowds on the streets, Broadway shows, people talking and shouting and eating and drinking, hustle and bustle, Times Square and Central Park, Greenwich Village and Harlem, all the myriad of things that go into the distinctive energy that informs life in the city with two names twice.

It has to be like that - otherwise, it wouldn't be New York.

- Sid

* The actual order of publication is:
Earthman, Come Home - 1955
They Shall Have Stars - 1956
The Triumph of Time - 1959
A Life For the Stars - 1962.

** Given the sequence in which the books are written, the selection of Chris deFord as protagonist is an odd one, given that his eventual execution by firing squad is casually mentioned near the start of Earthman, Come Home.

*** To be completely accurate, it's only Manhattan Island, not New York. We are never told if Brooklyn, Staten Island or Jersey City have also gone Okie.