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This article is currently partially written in the first person, and is highly POV in places. In particular, in a section I just removed, it cited a Blish character talking about playing with differential formalisms as an example of "absurd physics": in fact, this sort of formalism-play is not uncommon in mathematics, and is a useful and fruitful notation. -- The Anome 01:21, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)
A section about themes is probably in order.
Does so much space need to be devoted to these stories here? It's stuck in the middle of the biography section. The article is supposed to be about a prolific author, not about two short novels he wrote somewhere in the middle of his career. 12.22.250.4 18:35, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
Blish is said in the Arrowhead SF article to have been married to Virginia Kidd, the literary agent. The only wife mentioned here is fellow science fiction author J. A. Lawerence. Doesn't some mention of divorce and remarriage need to come in here? I don't want to turn Wikipedia into some sort of trashy tabloid, but isn't this a material fact that needs to be covered? Rlquall 12:39, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Judith Lawrence co-adapted many of the Star Trek stories for the original 12 collections, a fact I believe noted in the Philip Stephensen-Payne bibliography; it should be noted that three stories were singled out for special attention - the Gary Seven episode (intended as an offshoot pilot) which Blish (it appears) just thought was silly, so radically altered.. and the two Harry Mudd stories which, with an original third story, became Mudd's Angels. It has been suggested the venom against the character Mudd in the novel was mainly from Lawrence, though this is not verifiable. 90.192.195.27 (talk) 17:37, 20 March 2010 (UTC) Ian
Along similar lines this source suggests that he died of lung cancer caused by smoking, but I'm not sure how reliable it is. 143.159.185.234 (talk) 13:20, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
The 'SF Masterworks' collection gives the year 4104 for the end of the universe, which makes the text concerning 4004 vague and potentially misleading. I do not have knowledge of earlier editions, but perhaps someone more knowledgable could expand the section to give citations relating to a specific edition including the earlier date. Retrograde 01:02, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
The first story's main character is named "Steele", at least in the german translation. Somebody changed the name to "Sweeney" in the article though. I suspect that this is the name given to him in the english text then? Can somebody confirm/check this? 84.187.236.130 21:34, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
Yes, it's Sweeney in the English (presumably original) version.
NOTE ON CITIES ON FLIGHT: When referring to the novels as first, second, etc, the writer is referring to the internal chronology, not the order of publication. The order of publication was III, I, IV, II. One jarring result is that the sympathetic hero of II is casually killed off at the beginning of III, though what really happened was that Blish took a minor name from III and built an important character around it. CharlesTheBold 04:56, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
I undid a change to the article that said:
The text in both this article (James Blish) and the Spock Must Die! article both state that it was the first original SF novel. SO, if you are going to change this information here, you should change it in both places and cite your source on the information please. Thanks. David Reiss (talk) 14:41, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Blish's The Triumph of Time was the first serious science fiction I read as a kid. Later, I got the single-volume Cities in Flight tetralogy and read it straight through.
I just caught this fascinating article about anti-matter in today's paper:
A baffling question is why the universe consists almost entirely of matter and not anti-matter. Scientists think that both substances were created in equal measure at the big bang. "Where is all the anti-matter in the universe?" UC Santa Barbara physicist Benjamin Monreal asked. He speculated that it may be hiding in anti-matter galaxies, even in unseen anti-matter universes. [1]
It was an Aha! moment for me, because back in 1958, James Blish was ruminating on this very subject in 'The Triumph of Time'. The story is about the our universe's encounter with its "anti-matter evil twin," and their mutual annihilation and whether we could survive the catastrophe. This, to me, is science fiction at its purest. It is perhaps the ultimate science fiction because it deals with the ultimate event.
Though written in the late fifties and early sixties, Blish's epic transcends in subject and scope some of the technology in it, which we now regard today as quaint artifacts. But the basic ideas, anti-matter machines used to propel whole cities through deep space, and parallel matter-anit-matter universes, are taken quite seriously 60 years later, by today's scientists and futurists, as the article makes clear. Its headline, Scientists harness anti-matter, ordinary matter's 'evil twin,' is a great tribute to the memory of James Blish.
J M Rice (talk) 23:04, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
There was a no-headline mess at the top of this page that was pretty incomprehensible, and in any case messed up the page. It had something to do with hairsplitting about English and American spelling and the letter "e". If the author(s) thinks it's important, please place it in the normal sequence of entries, accompanied by a heading. J M Rice (talk) 23:18, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
I've tagged this whole section, added by a single editor last year, as needing sources. For starters, a Google search on "Haertel Scholium" points only to various places to which the text of this section has migrated. The term does not seem to have any currency elsewhere. There is, however, an article on this body of stories--"James Blish's 'Welcome to Mars' and the Haertel Complex", by David Ketterer (Science-Fiction Studies 11, 1984)--which is not referenced in the entry. I need to dig the relevant issue of SFS out of the basement, but I wonder how much of this section's data comes from that essay and how much is the original editor's original research. RLetson (talk) 07:12, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
Aside from the above, I would suggest that even if a collection includes one of these stories, that doesn't mean the whole COLLECTION is part of the series; as a long-term reader of Blish, I am not convinced there IS any such series... 90.192.195.27 (talk) 19:45, 20 March 2010 (UTC) Ian
An IP added and then removed the following text:
If this can be cited it seems well worth including. DES (talk) 00:28, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
I had never realised how short Blish's life was; in fact the article's information about him as a person is sparse. As yet another reader who had been influenced by Blish's writing in my schooldays, I doubt that I am the first to wonder about more in his life. Is much known? Is the exclusion of more detail for lack of citable material? For example, was his death accident, heart, cancer... etc? The article doesn't even mention that he was a microbiologist. I don't mean this as sniping at the authors and editors to date and have no idea where to search for more information myself, but does anyone have suggestions for more material or citable sources? JonRichfield
PS: I have just gone on a brief surfing after more info and found some useful items in the online SF encyclopedia [2]. Would there be objections to including some of the items from there, suitably cited and paraphrased?
(talk) 14:31, 11 June 2016 (UTC)JonRichfield (talk) 14:45, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
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Currently, at various points the article states,
"There is some overlap between the Cities in Flight saga and that of The Seedling Stars, mainly through one piece of technology, the Dirac Radio."
"The stories considered part of the Haertel Scholium include A Case of Conscience and the Pantropy series (see below). Both are anomalous in that they do not appear to have the Dirac Radio, though it is plausible to assume that A Case of Conscience takes place before the development of the Dirac."
"Blish's 'Pantropy' tales were collected in the book The Seedling Stars."
These are mutually contradictory. Does the Dirac radio form part of The Seedling Stars Pantropy 'verse or doesn't it? Is the "anomaly" referred to in the third quote endemic to Blish's writings or just in the mind of some OR-minded Wikipedian? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 11:00, 30 May 2017 (UTC)
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