Last time, New York landed on Utopia and Hazleton went missing with a local girl. Now things get worse. The city has to deal with a golden-armored space dictator, and then fly into the emptiest stretch of space anyone has ever seen.
Rick Deckard lands on the roof of the Mission Street Hall of Justice. It’s a fancy building, baroque spires, modern design, the works. There’s just one problem. He has never seen this building before in his life.
Perry opens this chapter with a line that stuck with me: “An equatorial jungle swamp provides an unpromising spawning ground for a world-class city.”
Three chapters this time, because Delany keeps them short and punchy here. Chapter IV is barely two pages. But those two pages are some of the strangest writing in the book so far.
We are now in the third novel of Cities in Flight, and this is the big one. “Earthman, Come Home” is the longest book in the collection, and it shifts focus to the character who matters most in this universe: Mayor John Amalfi of New York City. Not New York on Earth. New York flying through space, powered by spindizzy engines, looking for work among the stars.
This chapter is one of my favorites in the whole book. Rick Deckard walks into the War Memorial Opera House, sits down in a dress circle seat, and listens to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. And for a few minutes, he just enjoys the music. He’s a bounty hunter on a kill list, but right now he’s an audience member, and the singing is beautiful.
Perry opens with a memory from his childhood in 1930s New Jersey. A small wooden model boat, a Malayan prau, that he loved carrying around as a kid. His parents had lived in Southeast Asia in the 1920s, working on a rubber plantation. Their house was filled with exotic stuff: a tiger skin on the floor, an elephant-foot wastebasket, brass trays, opium pipes, batik hangings. For a kid growing up in suburban Maplewood during the Great Depression, this was basically having a portal to another world sitting in your living room.
So the last two chapters gave us Rydra Wong, famous poet and linguist, getting pulled into a military code-cracking mission. She figured out that Babel-17 is connected to upcoming attacks. And now she needs a ship and a crew. By morning.
This is it. The final part of A Life for the Stars. Chris deFord has gone from a farm boy snatched off Earth to someone who actually understands how Okie cities work. And now, in these last three chapters, everything comes together.
Chapter 8 is the one where the talking stops and the killing starts. Rick Deckard has spent the last few chapters traveling, testing, arguing. Now he has to actually shoot someone. And it almost goes very wrong.