Babel-17 Part 3, Chapter 4: Teaching the Butcher to Say I
This chapter is a long conversation. That’s it. Two people walking through a dark corridor on a ship, talking. And it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read in science fiction.
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Cities in Flight Retelling: The Triumph of Time Part 1 - New Earth and Old Problems
This is it. The fourth and final novel in Cities in Flight. “The Triumph of Time” is where Blish wraps up everything. New York City has left the Milky Way galaxy entirely. They crossed intergalactic space and settled on a planet called New Earth, in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. The flying days are over. The Okie era is finished. And Mayor Amalfi, after a thousand years of wandering, is supposed to be retired.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 17: The Trap
The morning after. Rick is sitting in a nice hotel chair, drinking room service coffee, feeling complicated. Rachael is in the shower, humming and splashing like nothing in the world is wrong. It looks like a normal scene. Two people. A quiet morning.
Singapore Unlikely Power Chapter 6 - Walking on a Razors Edge After Independence
When the British marched back into Singapore in 1945, they were not the gentlemen the locals had been raised to expect. A Malay observer described them as “often drunk and disorderly, consorting openly with women of the streets.” The image of the English gentleman was shattered. And honestly, so was pretty much everything else.
Babel-17 Part 3, Chapters 2-3: Things Get Brutal on Jebel Tarik
These two chapters hit hard. If Part 3’s first chapter was about arriving somewhere new and interesting, chapters 2 and 3 are about learning just how dangerous that place really is. People die. Rydra makes a discovery about the Butcher. And she finds out what Babel-17 can really do to human beings, including herself.
Cities in Flight Retelling: Earthman Come Home Part 8 - Coming Home
New York has left the Milky Way behind. The spindizzies are failing one by one. And on a planet in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, Mayor Amalfi is about to go head-to-head with the most notorious criminal city in Okie history. This is the finale.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 16: The Hotel Room
This is the chapter where everything gets personal. Not in an action movie way. In a quiet, bourbon-soaked, morally confusing hotel room kind of way.
Singapore Unlikely Power Chapter 5 Part 2 - The Fall of Singapore and Japanese Occupation
Churchill called December 10, 1941, “the worst day of the war.” Not because of some abstract strategic loss. Because on that day, the Royal Navy lost two of its biggest ships to Japanese aircraft. And with them, any illusion that Britain could defend Singapore.
Babel-17 Part 3, Chapter 1: Welcome to Jebel Tarik
Part 3 opens and everything is different. New location. New people. New danger. Rydra and what’s left of her crew wake up on a strange ship, and the rules have changed completely.
Cities in Flight Retelling: Earthman Come Home Part 7 - The Battle of Hern VI
Amalfi is turning a dead rock into a weapon. Hern VI is a planetoid, small and ugly, and his people are bolting spindizzy engines all over it. The work is brutal. Every driver has to be placed at exact compass points, locked to the center of gravity, balanced against every other machine. And there still aren’t enough to make the thing fully steerable. When this rock finally flies, it will be clumsy and wild. But it will fly.