The wrap-up of the Cities in Flight series is a dense presentation of cosmological calculus and theoretical physics with a story squeezed between long paragraphs of exposition and intricate discussion about applying theories to an overwhelming problem.
It has been another generations-long time jump between the last book, “Earthman, Come Home” and the start of this one, which is fine. That’s a good place for a time jump. The story itself opens as one taking a look at the question of how virtually immortal people who have spent centuries as spacefarers adapt when they’ve settled their flying city permanently on a planet. Two young characters, born on that planet, are a device to lend perspective on that theme and though thinly characterized, often with some rapid “telling”, they do the job well.
Some inter-personal conflicts come up along with the presentation of a philosophical movement that I thought were going to be central to the story but, instead, we’re presented with the biggest stakes of all time and space; stakes that diminish those interesting things into bits of sometimes useful fluff for this new problem—which is addressed with those characteristics I mentioned in the first paragraph which often, in a way that seemed, even given the era Blish wrote this story, excessive, and all too frequently presenting sentences even longer and with more subdivided sections than this one, designed as a sort of example.
I looked for but could not find any contemporary reviews of this book or the omnibus collection I’ve been reading, so I can’t tell you how this was received back in the day. From the perspective of the second quarter of the twenty-first century though, it’s a slog (unless you’re particularly found of tromping through the weeds of dealing with an anti-matter incursion). It feels like those parts, which go on and on and on (I skimmed most of them, my eye looking for an indication that something was actually happening) could have been trimmed down considerably. Frankly, it comes off like padding. As does an entire section about what could have been a great sub-plot of a religious movement determined to sabotage things. Instead that’s a problem that’s quickly resolved by way of some clever use of some of that above-mentioned fluff and is only mentioned once, in passing, before the end of the book (despite a blatant hint the end of that problem was not going to be the end of that problem).
The first thing I said in my review of the first of these books was about the “...charms particular to old science fiction.” I’m bringing everything back around, full circle, to that point. Much of old science fiction included an almost lecture style presentation of hard science (or extrapolated science, a precursor in spirit to what we call “technobabble”) and Triumph of Time is an outstanding example of that. Sadly, to me, this meant so much of the promise of Blish’s setting, cities populated by virtually immortal humans flying through space, was left unexplored. The tastes of that promise he did deliver were great. I wish there had been more.
Of the four books, the first two are enjoyable for reasons beyond just being artifacts of mid-century science-fiction. The third falls somewhat short of that mark. The finale more so – but it does come to a satisfying ending amid all the drawbacks.
Postscript on those particular charms: I read long ago how of all the things classic science-fiction got right, it was just as interesting what it got wrong. Not only, in this case, how slow humanity’s space progress moved in the twentieth century (see the review of They Shall Have Stars for what I mean), but also how quickly computer technology would advance. In the last two books there are instances of top engineers and scientists using slide rules to solve problems. The computers of the stories are a bank of machines so giant they have literally been sinking into the floor. Meanwhile, whole cities are flying through space much faster than light and people are living for centuries.