Flights of Eagles by James Blish

NOTE: Flights of Eagles was a free review copy provided to Luke Reviews by NESFA Press.


I’ve been exploring James Blish recently, with the volume Flights of Eagles, and found a lot to my liking. Before I dive into thoughts on the four short stories contained within, I just want to remind you all that the reviews of the three novels in this collection can be found at the links below:

Welcome to Mars

Jack of Eagles

Get Out of My Sky

At the beginning of this volume, we are given an introduction by Tom Shippey that does a very nice job of placing the contents of this volume in the context of the genre as it was being produced, although it also gave a few minor plot points away, so it may be worth exploring after reading the rest of the volume, depending on personal preference. As to the stories:

“The Thing in the Attic”: Part of the same cycle of stories that includes Blish’s famed “Surface Tension,” this story features a group of people who live in the “attic,” a canopy above the forest floor. Honath is labeled a heretic, and sent to “Hell”: the forest floor. Tehre he must learn to survive if he is ever to return from his sentence. This is a solid story that is very engaging. A fun read.

“The Writing of the Rat”: A tale of interplanetary war unlike any other, this short story pulls off both a bit of action and some interesting thought, wrapped around a cryptographic clue that (while not at all integral to enjoying the story) is an intriguing puzzle in its own right.

“The Genius Heap”: A social experiment is set up with means that may not be as simple as they first seem in this tale that isn’t the strongest of the bunch, but is still fun. The ending thoughts on creativity and art as a necessity for society were surprisingly noncommittal.

“Tiger Ride” (with Damon Knight): Can too much protecting of humanity be a bad thing for them? The answer, especially to fans of science fiction, won’t be a surprise (John W. Campbell, Jr. in particular addressed this one quite well, making it the focus rather than the gimmick). The tale isn’t bad, but a little over-trodden, using a gimmick ending that didn’t add anything to the plot.

Taken as a whole, this volume was a wonderful trip through the work of an author far too important to the genre to be as close to forgotten as he now is. If you have read the classics of Blish, dig a bit deeper with this volume. If you are new to his work, this is a great place to start. Either way, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

8/10

Get Out of My Sky by James Blish

NOTE: Flights of Eagles was a free review copy provided to Luke Reviews by NESFA Press.


After really liking the first two novels in Flights of Eagles, I was really looking forward to the third. As it turned out, despite being labeled a novel on the dust jacket description, it is more a novella than anything else, not clocking in at a very high word count. Regardless, I delved into Get Out of My Sky.

The planet Home has its problems: the two continents don’t get along, the rival political parties are quite truly at each others’ throats, and their world is almost completely water, not leaving much room for everyone. However, when they realize their twin planet, Rathe, which orbits with them in a binary planet orbit, is populated with another sentient race, war isn’t far off. Each feels threatened by the other, and they wind up in a stalemate of mutually assured destruction. So, when a chance for peace with Rathe offers itself, Aidregh, the First Minister of Thennen on Home, must risk the trip to the other planet if he hopes to save the future.

Blish manages to pile a lot of different story types all into one with this tale: two alien races with no humans, ESP, interplanetary struggle, mysticism. He meshes them all together quite well. What he turns out isn’t the best story in this volume (I would argue that it is “rare,” as the description states, in part because it isn’t Blish’s best work), it still is interesting. The pace is slow, and it felt like it could have taken off more than it did. This one might have worked better cut down into a short story, or fleshed out into a novel, but it just didn’t feel like it was right at this length.

However, it certainly wasn’t all bad. There were characters with plenty of potential, and an intriguing plot concept. Even the mystery brought up in the story had potential, although it went unresolved. The key problem, in my mind, was that it just tried to do too much with too little space. Cut back on some of the threads, or flesh them out. Explore them, and let them reach a conclusion. A longer novel could have been really good.

6/10

Jack of Eagles by James Blish

NOTE: Flights of Eagles was a free review copy provided to Luke Reviews by NESFA Press.


One sub-genre that seemed to rise during the fifties was that of ESP and psi. While we frequently hear anything involving psychics and scream “Pseudoscience!” now, at the time it was a burgeoning area of exploration. John W. Campbell, Jr. was still a force, and his interest in just this sort of thing (he was an early backer of Dianetics, another attempt for a science of the mind, this time by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard; agree with it or disagree with it as you will, it is a historical occurrence, and very much a part of that time period’s trends and goals) meant that it popped up more and more. Classics of the genre include Slan by A. E. van Vogt (another Hubbard backer with Scientology, the continuation of Dianetics), Alfred Bester’s Demolished Man, and Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. Those novels all went on to become science fiction classics. James Blish entered the fray near the forefront of the wave, with his first novel, Jack of Eagles.

Danny Caiden is about as average as you can get, working as a journalist who writes up articles about food, living by himself in a rather simple apartment. But he has a rather uncanny knack for finding things, even when there is no possible way for him to know they are there. And now he has started hearing things that haven’t happened yet, but when they finally do, he knows something is up. He approaches parapsychologists, psychic research groups, even a fraud of a medium, and embroils himself in a plot that involves the FBI, the mob, and the end of the world.

Jack of Eagles proved to be another fun adventure found in Flights of Eagles, the new James Blish collection out from NESFA Press. Like in the previous novel from this collection, Blish has the hard task of trying to overcome what may seem to be completely asinine and logic-free moments. When encountered with a bit of telekinesis, most people don’t immediately think, “By golly there must be a scientific explanation for this, and I bet it involves using a visualization of the electron cloud of every single particle that makes up the object I just moved, and then altering each ones’ subatomic structure in such a way that it causes it to lose any influence by gravity whatsoever.” Sounds ridiculous, but Blish somehow pulls it off. The novel reads very much like an action-thriller with a solid science background, rather than a pseudoscience meltdown. Blish builds Danny into a solid character (although some, like Marla, don’t get much depth). The plot twists abound, and no one is as they seem. A lark of a novel, but a fun one nevertheless.

7/10

Welcome to Mars by James Blish

NOTE: Flights of Eagles was a free review copy provided to Luke Reviews by NESFA Press.


James Blish is a very important author in the development of the science fiction genre, so I was saddened that my only knowledge of his work was through the only two pieces one can find easily in print now, A Case of Conscience and “Surface Tension.” So when I received a copy of NESFA Press’ new collection of Blish’s work, I couldn’t wait to dive in. It contains three novels and four short stories. I’m treating it like an omnibus, giving the novels individual reviews, and adding reviews of the short stories to the book review as a whole.

Welcome to Mars is the first piece in this collection. As a foray into YA fiction uncommon with the author, as well as a piece of the foundation of Blish’s own future history, it is certainly an interesting piece for fans and those seeking curiosities, but I couldn’t help but wonder if it had perhaps been out of print for a long time for a reason. With that hesitation, yet my above excitement, I began the novel.

Dolph is hardly your normal 18-year-old. He doesn’t play outside as much as his stepfather would like, instead spending his time in the attic of his garage working on experiments. It is on one of those days that Dolph finds a means to nullify gravity, and begins his plans to travel to Mars. However, things certainly don’t go as planned, as Dolph manages to damage the one irreplaceable piece on his ship. His friend, Nanette, is on the way, and when she arrives, Dolph realizes that, far from solving his problems, they have just begun.

Welcome to Mars is, to put it simply, a very fun read. Like in Heinlein’s “juveniles,” and other YA gerne works from that period written by authors who primarily wrote for adults, Blish’s novel doesn’t suffer at all from the dumbing down of concepts. Blish tackles the science quite freely, but doing so in a way that flows perfectly into the story, interjecting the outlandish idea of a teenager discovering gravity-nullifying technology that allows him to build a backyard spaceship with hints of a realism that make things far more easy to swallow and credible.

At times, the novel shows its age a little. Blish, despite mourning the glacial pace of NASA and taking that into consideration in his extrapolations, still managed to give their pace too much credit (which says far more about NASA than Blish, which is an entirely different post). Also, some of the attitudes of the time can come across as quaint, for lack of a better word. I don’t think that, realistically, a man and a woman in their late teens, stranded on Mars with no way to contact Earth and no real chance to expect rescue or other surprise intervention, would ever utter the words “not what a proper lady is raised to talk about” (paraphrased) when discussing a life-threatening illness.

However, those little bits seem to do more to give the text color than to hurt the reading of it. The story moves along nicely, working hard to cover each bit with at least some scientific factualization. Both Dolph and Nanette manage to be fun characters who don’t do too poorly when in over their heads. All-in-all, this one is definitely a worthwhile read (more so than most YA science fiction out there today, I would wager), and a very nice start to the Blish collection.

8/10