Gary Peterson's Reviews > They Shall Have Stars

The Future Ain't What It Used to Be

One down and three to go in James Blish's celebrated Cities in Flight series. It was great fun reading about the years 2018 through 2020 as forecast in the 1950s. Of course the envisioned future failed to come about exactly as Blish pictured it, but what progress we lack today in interplanetary travel we made up for in other ways: Instances of mailing paper letters and burning the carbons made me grateful for the computer age, e-mail, and the internet. But references to the decline of the West, the ongoing Cold War with the Soviets, and a thinly veiled Joseph McCarthy character still have troubling parallels today.

This short novel packed a lot in: Government corruption and the accompanying personal feuds and power grabs, religious revivalism reflective of today's "woke" churches (Blish's Believers rewrite the Bible regularly), scientific progress and the pesky ethical questions that present hurdles to questionable outcomes, and government workers investing (and losing) their lives in Sisyphean projects--the Bridge on Jupiter--that are simply stepping stones and smokescreens for other projects the workers are never made privy to. There's even a little romance too.

I will admit I skimmed the "hard science" portions complete with mathematical formulae, but I never lost the thread of the story. To Blish's credit he balances well a character-driven narrative with the theoretical science and convinced me his future world was a reasonable and attainable one. It also testified to the fact that while scientific advancements can be made that stagger the imagination, the people populating the world will still suffer the same foibles, fears, and frailties that have plagued humanity since the beginning.

The Believers' catchphrase is [book:Millions Now Living Will Never Die!|, which was a celebrated 1920 book by Jehovah's Witnesses leader Judge Rutherford. The Witnesses were and are still known for holding annual meetings in stadiums, and were rewriting the Bible when creating their New World Translation, so Blish was assuredly drawing upon that organization, but for what purpose? I found their appearances intriguing, but they never figured into the actual plot as more than window dressing. Maybe this was laying the groundwork for later developments in later books?

A prescient passage for the Covid plandemic era of 2020-2021: "In fifty years of unrelenting pressure, they succeeded in converting the West into a system so like the Soviets' as to make direct military action unnecessary; we Sovietized ourselves and our moves are now exactly predictable (p. 147)."

Substitute for the Soviets Big Tech, Big Government, Big Pharma et al. that has cowed a populace with fear and tracks our every online move and purchase and uses logarithms to suggest the next one. Substitute the czars of the cancel culture and their online doxing and intimidating footsoldiers for MacHinery and his "gumshoes" that target and tear down decent people. Carbon papers aside, perhaps Blish did after all rightly envision this period of history in his entertaining and thought-provoking novel.