Cities in Flight

Blish, James. Cities in Flight. Tetralogy, 1955-62. Coll. one vol. New York: Avon, 1970.

The "cities in flight" are literal cities flying off to the "cosmic frontier"; their usual form of government is "totalitarian technocracy," a form of government Blish seems to present neutrally (see Wolfe 122-23). In The Triumph of Time, the last vol. of the tetralogy, "The city is finally revealed as merely a machine . . ." (Wolfe 124).[[1]]

Novelette "Bindlestiff." Astounding December 1950. Reprinted The Best of Astounding: Classic Short Novels from the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Ed. James Gunn. NYC: Carroll & Graf, 1992. Listed in Benford and Zebrowski's Skylife: Space Habitats in Story and Science.