Encapsulated in an ironical definition of genre SF we have the essence of James Blish - his sceptical intelligence, his culture, his sense of humour as well as his rather twisted imagination. Who else could or would have defined genre science fiction by reference to Oswald Spengler's cyclical theory of history? Yet Spengler was only one of Blish's abiding interests, along with late romantic german music, the poetry of Ezra Pound, christian theology, the fantasies of James Branch Cabell, and of course, science fiction. All of these interests were serious and intense.
Blish was an amateur scholar and musicologist of some distinction. Paradoxically he was also one of the few major science fiction authors to have a scientific education (he was trained as a biologist), and who knew enough science to be able to fake it convincingly. During the decade when he was at the top of his creative form, roughly from 1949 to 1959, Blish produced a remarkable body of work which contributed a great deal to the definition of american magazine science fiction. David Pringle is only one of those to signal the importance of the early fifties in the shaping of modern SF. The range of genre science fiction, until then defined between "Astounding" and "Thrilling Wonder Stories", was significantly extended by the apparition of the new magazines during the post war SF boom. "Galaxy", "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction", and "If" are only the better known of these. Blish was a major contributor to all of these magazines, and almost all of his worthwhile fiction was published there. 
David Ketterer, who has written a fine book on Blish, (IMPRISONED IN A TESSERACT) considers that his SF is probably the best of the period, superior to that of Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke and Heinlein. Certainly it is more carefully crafted as well as being more scientifically and philosophically inclined than that of his immediate rivals. However, Blish was also a very uneven writer. (In this he is quite different from someone like Barrington Bayley, who is always engaging.) A decade of excellent work was followed by a rapid decline. Much of what he wrote during his last sixteen years can only be considered with embarassment. This may also help explain why he is almost completely forgotten today. At the peak of his powers, Blish was possibly the best of all genre SF writers.
After an apprenticeship as an enthusiastic "fan" (He was one of the youngest of the young "futurians"), Blish established himself during the late forties as a pulp writer in all of the major genres, but soon concentrated on science fiction. Incredibly almost all of Blish's major work was produced in his spare time, during the evenings after work (he was a technical writer and a publicist during the day).
Sadly, his last years were difficult. After deciding to become a full time writer and moving to England in the early sixties, Blish found himself gradually estranged from SF, but incapable of establishing himself as a writer outside the category. His non SF projects did not meet any great success; indeed, he never was able to publish two non-genre novels. Ill health, alcoholism, the cancer which would eventually kill him, all afflicted those years. The man who had made a reputation as an uncompromising critic of magazine SF (under the nom de guerre, William Atheling Jr.), an implacable enemy of sci-fi, turned to the "novelization" of the Star Trek cult, which he affected to despise, but which nevertheless brought more fan correspondance (which he treated seriously) than all of his years of "serious" work. Ironically the last six or seven of those books were apparently written by the team of his wife and mother in law(!), Blish himself being too sick and too miserable to do any work. This hackwork, much of which he didn't write, is now better known under his name, and is certainly a more valuable commercial property, than the real science-fiction that he wrote. The Star Trek tie-ins are a publishing phenomenon, while almost none of Blish is in print today.
Blish was basically a short story writer. Certainly his best work was in the form of short fiction. This may sound surprising when one considers his bibliography of over twenty published novels, but when one excludes all of the juveniles and of the potboilers from the list, one realizes that almost all his remaining novels are in fact "fix-ups" of previously published short stories. "The Seedling Stars" may be listed as a novel, but it is in fact a very loosely connected sequence of five short stories. The most significant part of the "Cities in Flight" novels were published in fragmentary form. And even his A CASE OF CONSCIENCE, for which he won an unlikely Hugo award for the best SF novel of 1958, was in truth an expansion of a much better novella published five years previously. But only four collections of his short stories were published when he was
alive, and one of these was only marketed in the U.K.
"We did not have the time to learn
everything we wanted to know."
- from A TRIUMPH OF TIME
copyright 1998 Marc-André Brie
Notes on the writings of James Blish
Astounding Worlds of Barrington Bayley!
|Brian W. Aldiss|James Blish|
Philip K. Dick|Charles L. Harness|
A. E. van Vogt|
Introducing K. W. Jeter
