James Blish facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
James Blish
|
|
|---|---|
| Born | James Benjamin Blish May 23, 1921 East Orange, New Jersey, United States |
| Died | July 30, 1975 (aged 54) Henley-on-Thames, England, United Kingdom |
| Pen name |
|
| Occupation | Writer, Literary critic |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | American |
| Education |
|
| Period | 1940–1975 |
| Genre | Science fiction, Fantasy |
| Years active | 1940–1975 |
| Spouses |
|
| Children | 3 |
| Signature | |
 |
|
James Benjamin Blish (May 23, 1921 – July 30, 1975) was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is best known for his Cities in Flight novels and his series of Star Trek novelizations written with his wife, J. A. Lawrence. His novel A Case of Conscience won the Hugo Award. He is credited with creating the term "gas giant" to refer to large planetary bodies.
His first published stories appeared in Super Science Stories and Amazing Stories.
Blish wrote literary criticism of science fiction using the pen name William Atheling Jr. His other pen names included Donald Laverty, John MacDougal, and Arthur Lloyd Merlyn.
Life
Blish was born on May 23, 1921, at East Orange, New Jersey. While in high school, Blish self-published a fanzine, called The Planeteer, using a hectograph. The fanzine ran for six issues.
Blish was a member of the Futurians.
Blish attended meetings of the Futurian Science Fiction Society in New York City during this period. Futurian members Damon Knight and Cyril M. Kornbluth became close friends. However, Blish's relationships with other members were often bitter. A personal target was fellow member Judith Merril, with whom he would debate politics.
Blish studied microbiology at Rutgers University, graduating in 1942. He was drafted into Army service, and he served briefly as a medical laboratory technician. The United States Army discharged him for refusing orders to clean a grease trap in 1944. Following discharge, Blish entered Columbia University as a masters student of zoology. He did not complete the program, opting to write fiction full-time.
In 1947, he married Virginia Kidd, a fellow Futurian. They divorced in 1963. Blish then married artist J. A. Lawrence in 1964, moving to England that same year.
From 1962 to 1968, Blish worked for the Tobacco Institute as a writer and critic. Much of his work for the institute went uncredited.
Blish died on July 30, 1975, from complications related to lung cancer. He was buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford. The Bodleian Library at Oxford is the custodian of Blish's papers. The library also has a complete catalog of Blish's published works.
Career
Throughout the 1940s, Blish published most of his stories in the few pulp magazines still in circulation. His first story was sold to fellow Futurian Frederik Pohl for Super Science Stories (1940), called "Emergency Refueling". Other stories were published intermittently, but with little circulation. Blish's "Chaos, Co-Ordinated", co-written with Robert A. W. Lowndes, was sold to Astounding Science Fiction, appearing in the October 1946 issue, earning Blish national circulation for the first time.
Pantropy (1942–1956)
Blish was what Andrew Litpack called a "practical writer". He would revisit, revise, and often expand on previously written stories. An example is "Sunken Universe" published in Super Science Stories in 1942. The story reappeared in Galaxy Science Fiction as "Surface Tension", in an altered form in 1952. The premise emphasized Blish's understanding of microbiology, and featured microscopic humans engineered to live on a hostile planet's shallow pools of water. The story proved to be among Blish's more popular and was anthologized in the first volume of Robert Silverberg's The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. It was also anthologized in The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.
The world of microscopic humans continued in "The Thing in the Attic" in 1954, and "Watershed" the following year. The fourth entry, "A Time to Survive", was published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1957. The stories were collected, edited together, and published as the fix-up The Seedling Stars (1956), by Gnome Press. John Clute said all of Blish's "deeply felt work" explored "confronting the Faustian (or Frankensteinian) man".
Cities in Flight (1950–1958)
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction asserts that not until the 1950s, and the Okie sequence of stories beginning their run, "did it become clear [Blish] would become a [science fiction] writer of unusual depth". The stories were loosely based on the Okie migration following the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and were influenced by Oswald Spengler's two-part Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West).
The stories detail the life of the Okies, humans who migrate throughout space looking for work in vast city-ships, powered by spindizzies, a type of anti-gravity engine. The premise and plot reflected Blish's feelings on the state of western civilization, and his personal politics. The first two stories, "Okie", and "Bindlestiff", were published in 1950, by Astounding. "Sargasso of Lost Cities" appeared in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books in April 1953. "Earthman, Come Home" followed a few months later, published by Astounding. In 1955, Blish collected the four stories together into an omnibus titled Earthman, Come Home, published by Putnam.
More stories followed: In 1956, They Shall Have Stars, which edited together "Bridge" and "At Death’s End", and in 1958, Blish published The Triumph of Time. Four years later, he published a new Okies novel, A Life for the Stars. The Okies sequence was edited together and published as Cities In Flight (1970).
Clute notes, "the brilliance of Cities in Flight does not lie in the assemblage of its parts, but in the momentum of the ideas embodied in it (albeit sometimes obscurely)."
After Such Knowledge (1958–1971)
Blish continued to rework older stories, and did so for one of his best known works, A Case of Conscience (1958). The novel originated as a novella, originally published in an issue of If, in 1953. The story follows a Jesuit priest, Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, who visits the planet Lithia as a technical member of an expedition. While on the planet they discover a race of bipedal reptilians that have perfected morality in what Ruiz-Sanchez says is "the absence of God", and theological complications ensue. The book is one of the first major works in the genre to explore religion and its implications. It was the first of a series including Doctor Mirabilis (1964) and the two-part story Black Easter (1968) and The Day After Judgment (1971). The latter two were collected as The Devil's Day (1980). An omnibus of all four entries in the series was published by Legend in 1991, titled After Such Knowledge.
A Case of Conscience won the 1959 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and was collected as part of Library of America’s omnibus American Science Fiction: Five Classic Novels 1956-1958.
Star Trek (1967–1977)
Bantam Books commissioned Blish to adapt episodes of Star Trek. The adapted short stories were generally based on draft scripts and contained different plot elements from the aired television episodes.
The stories were collected into twelve volumes and published as a title series of the same name from 1967 to 1977. The adaptations were largely written by Blish; however, his declining health during this period proved problematic. His wife, J. A. Lawrence, wrote a number of installments. Her work remained uncredited until the final volume, Star Trek 12, published in 1977, two years after Blish's death.
The first original novel for adults based on the television series, Spock Must Die! (1970), was also written by Blish, and he planned to release more. According to Lawrence, two episodes featuring popular character Harry Mudd, "I, Mudd" and "Mudd's Women", were held back by Blish for adaptation to be included in the follow-up to Spock Must Die!. However, Blish died before a novel could be completed. Lawrence did eventually adapt the two episodes, as Mudd's Angels (1978), which included an original novella The Business, as Usual, During Altercations by Lawrence. In her introduction to Star Trek 12, Lawrence states that Blish "did indeed write" adaptations of the two episodes. The introduction to Mudd's Angels acknowledges this, stating that Blish left the two stories in various stages of completion and they were finished by Lawrence; Blish does not receive author credit on the book.
Blish credited his financial stability later in life to the Star Trek commission and the advance he received for Spock Must Die!.
Honors, awards and recognition
The British Science Fiction Foundation inaugurated the James Blish Award for science fiction criticism in 1977, recognizing Brian W. Aldiss. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2002.
Awards and nominations
- 1959 Hugo Award for Best Novel, for A Case of Conscience.
- 1965 Nebula Award nomination for Best Novelette, for "The Shipwrecked Hotel", with Norman L. Knight.
- 1968 Nebula Award nomination for Best Novel, for Black Easter.
- 1970 Hugo Award nomination for Best Novella, for We All Die Naked.
- 1970 Nebula Award nomination for Best Novella, for A Style in Treason.
Posthumous Awards and nominations
- 2001 [1951] Retro-Hugo Award nomination for Best Novelette, for "Okie".
- 2004 [1954] Retro-Hugo Award for Best Novella, for A Case of Conscience.
- 2004 [1954] Retro-Hugo Award for Best Novelette, for "Earthman, Come Home".
Guest of Honor
- 1960 Guest of Honor, 18th World Science Fiction Convention.
- 1970 Guest of Honor, Scicon 70.
