Earthman, Come Home

Blish, James. Earthman, Come Home. NYC: Putnam, 1955. Combining the stories "Okie", "Bindlestiff", "Sargasso of Lost Cities" and "Earthman, Come Home." "Specially abridged by the author," NYC: Avon, © 1955, otherwise n.d. Cities in Flight Series #3. For translations, reprints, reviews, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of February 2026, here.[1] For bibliographic information and summary, see Wikipedia article here.[2]

Note for the Cities in Flight series, the "spindizzy" device that allows whole cities to move through the cosmos at FTL speeds and land on planets;[3] and "The City Fathers," which the local A.I. Overviewer for the Initial Compiler describes as "advanced, super-intelligent computers that act as the administrative, legal, and technical brain of the nomadic flying cities." Technovelgy.com has an entry on "Machine Psychologist," which comments (we assume on a submitted question with a quotation), "The machines referred to here are of course the city fathers, an early sfnal [science-fictional] description of artificial intelligence." The site suggests that we "Compare this device with the robot psyche tester from Colony (1953) by Philip K. Dick, Sigrid von Shrink from Gateway (1970) by Frederik Pohl, the mechanotherapist from "Bad Medicine" (a 1956 Robert Sheckley story), Dr. Smile, from Dick's 1964 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch."[4]

Note more specifically that John Amalfi, the incredibly old mayor of (Oakie) City of New York, doesn't always obey The City Fathers; so for or a major, early example of human/A.I. cooperation and tensions —— between conscious agents, organic and what we can call cybernetic see Chapter One: The Rift (in the 1955 fix-up, pp. 20-21).

RDE, finishing, 17 Feb. 2026