James Blish - Cities in Flight

When aristocratic factionalism has been suppressed, the king and the aristocracy become allies against the rising power of the bourgeoisie, who soon become ripe for revolution, as do the Okies after the “collapse of the germanium standard” in 3900. The gathering of the mayors aboard Buda-Pesht and the March on Earth that follows, even though it results in apparent defeat in the Battle of Earth, can be regarded as the 1789, and the passage of the anti-Okie bill in 3976 as the 1815, of Earthman history.

At this point, so far as the galaxy proper is concerned, the story of the Earthmanist Culture comes to a sudden end, for the Earthman domains are invaded and conquered by a non-human “culture,” the Web of Hercules. Since this is so, we are unable to test our evaluation of the 3900-3976 period against later events. Even so, and even though Mayor Amalfi, the principal hero and leading cultural morphologist of CITIES IN FLIGHT, believes that the Okies have been completely defeated, I can see no reason to believe that the restoration of the Ancien Regime in 3976 would have been any more permanent than it was in 1815.

4. The Triumph of Time over Space

Following the Battle of Earth, New York moves from the galaxy proper to the Greater Magellanic Cloud. The military and political events that ensue upon its arrival there are perhaps, and the philosophy of Stochasticism is certainly, consistent with the beginning of the Period of Contending States. Here the beginning is all that we can know anything about, for once again history is cut short—this time by the “totally universal physical cataclysm” of the year 4004.

The fourth volume of CITIES IN FLIGHT in its U.S. edition bears the title The Triumph of Time. Since the principal theme here is not especially Spenglerian, my purpose is simply to note that this title, and indeed the story itself, could have been inspired, whether or not it was, by a passage on Spengler’s final page:

Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man—a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes. [II, 507]

1 . The volume-page references in this essay are to the translation of Spengler by Charles Francis Atkinson (two volumes: New York: Knopf, 1926, 1928). Spengler completed this work in late 1922.

2 . The Issue at Hand (Chicago: Advent, 1964), p. 6on.

3 . Spengler uses the phrases ‘centralized bureaucracy—state” in connection with the Egyptian third political epoch [I, Table iii], but I hardly think that Blish’s Bureaucratic State is intended to be an aristocratic state.

4 . This table is based primarily on the three tables that appear at the end of Spengler’s first volume: “Cultural Epochs” and “Political Epochs” (organized as in this table) and “Spiritual Epochs” (organized as spring, summer, autumn, winter). Making the table turned out to be very difficult for me, partly because of the necessity for squaring the two organizations, partly because Spengler does not tabulate the political epochs for the Arabian Culture, partly because the dates in the three tables are not wholly consistent with each other or with those in the text, which is not wholly self-consistent, but primarily because of the need to select and interpret in such a way that a much abbreviated amalgamation would make sense to me, and hopefully to the reader.

5 . The title The Triumph of Time came from Swinburne, but as Dr. Mullen infers, and the text of the last volume shows, I would never have hit upon it without Spengler’s peroration. When my English publishers, for practical reasons of their own, asked me for another title, A Clash of Cymbals sprang instantly to mind as a perfect three-way ideogrammatic pun, and indeed a number of reviewers in England turned Cymbals” into “Symbols”.—J.B.

–R D M