Dirk Grobbelaar's Reviews > They Shall Have Stars

Yet the barbarians, who are not divided by rival traditions, fight all the more incessantly for food and space. Peoples cannot love one another unless they love the same ideas. – George Santayana

It can be challenging reviewing older speculative fiction books by modern standards. Many things have changed: scientific knowledge, obviously, but also cultural mores and the way that books are being published (a very real Achilles heel for older books; word count limitations upon serialization affected characterization dramatically, since the focus would always be on the “idea”).

They Shall Have Stars is the first in the Cities In Flight (or “Okies”) series (in terms of internal chronology). It was published in the 1950s and has a lot of the hallmarks of a Science Fiction novel from that era, for better or worse. That said: this is hard SF and not anything like planet adventure or space opera.

Fun trivia: Amalthea is still referred to as Jupiter V, even though this novel takes place in the “future”. Well, to be exact, circa 2013 through 2018 or so. Alternate history then?

The rest of the sky was crawling with color, striped and blotched with the eternal, frigid, poisonous storming of Jupiter’s atmosphere, spotted with the deep-black, planet-sized shadows of moons closer to the sun than Jupiter V.

Somewhere down there, six thousand miles below the clouds that boiled in his face, was the Bridge. The Bridge was thirty miles high and eleven miles wide and fifty-four miles long – but it was only a sliver, an intricate and fragile arrangement of ice-crystals beneath the bulging, racing tornadoes.

Nevertheless, I found this novel very engaging. The “Ice Bridge” experiment, as depicted, in the atmosphere of Jupiter, stands up to just about any modern day SF novel in scope and execution.

”One of these days, Jupiter is going to destroy the Bridge. It’ll go flying away in little flinders, into the storms. My mind will be there, supervising some puny job, and my mind will go flying away along with my mechanical eyes and ears and hands – still trying to adapt to the unthinkable, tumbling away into the winds and the flames and the rains and the darkness and the pressure and the cold—“

There are some philosophical undertones, but mostly this novel sets up the rest of the series (for example, there is no “city in flight” yet). In fact, They Shall Have Stars really deals with the events and political and scientific status quo that led to the pioneering of the Spindizzy drive. Or, in general terms, the invention of a space drive capable of making interstellar voyages.

Should the temple bell be struck so continually that it has to shatter – make all its worshippers ill with terror until it is silenced?

It is a short novel, and a quick read, and in the end I found it to be quite good. The climax is excellently executed for the most part and generated quite a bit of excitement as readers can finally see how pieces fit together, and the fruits of one man’s obsession to give us the stars.

Stunned, he made a very rough estimate in his head of the increase in parallax and tried to calculate the ship’s rate of approach from that.

4.5 stars, but rounded down because of the lack of flying cities. I know, I am being petty (tongue in cheek, of course), but fortunately the rest of the series promises to deliver on that front.