Cities in Flight Retelling: The Afterword - Spengler and the Okie Universe

If you made it through all four novels, you might have noticed something. Characters keep dropping the name “Spengler.” Chris gets force-fed Spenglerian philosophy. Cultural morphologists show up and claim they can predict how entire civilizations will behave. Mayor Amalfi makes decisions based on this stuff.

But the book never really stops to explain who Spengler was or why any of it matters. That’s what the afterword is for. And honestly, it’s one of the most interesting parts of the whole book.

Who Wrote the Afterword?

The afterword is by R.D. Mullen, a scholar who analyzed Cities in Flight through the lens of Oswald Spengler’s philosophy. It first appeared in a journal called Riverside Quarterly in 1968, and Blish liked it enough to include a revised version in the collected edition. Blish even added his own footnotes, responding to Mullen’s criticisms and admitting where he got things wrong.

That back-and-forth between the author and the critic, right there in the same pages, is pretty rare. And it tells you something about how seriously Blish took the ideas behind his stories.

So Who Was Spengler?

Oswald Spengler was a German philosopher who published a book called The Decline of the West in the 1920s. His big idea was this: civilizations are like living things. They’re born, they grow, they reach maturity, and then they die. And this process follows a pattern.

Every civilization, according to Spengler, goes through the same basic stages. You get feudalism first. Then aristocracy. Then absolutism, where a strong central power takes over. Then revolution, where the common people push back. And finally something he called Caesarism, where a strong leader rises from the chaos and takes control of everything.

Here’s the thing: Spengler didn’t think this was random. He believed these stages were as predictable as the life cycle of a plant. A baby grows into an adult, not a horse. A civilization born in feudalism will eventually reach Caesarism. You can’t stop it any more than you can stop winter from coming after autumn.

For Spengler, there was also an important difference between “culture” and “civilization.” A culture is alive, creative, growing. A civilization is what you get after the culture runs out of creative energy. The shell remains, the institutions keep going, but the soul is gone. Think of it like a tree that’s dead inside but still standing. It can stay upright for centuries, but it’s not really alive anymore.

How Blish Used This

Blish took Spengler’s framework and built his entire future history around it. The whole arc of Cities in Flight follows Spengler’s pattern, just projected thousands of years into the future and across the galaxy.

In the first novel, They Shall Have Stars, we see the Western civilization reaching what Spengler would call Caesarism. MacHinery runs the security state. Scientists can’t do their work. Freedom is dying. Senator Wagoner sees all this and understands that the current system is finished. That’s a thoroughly Spenglerian reading of the near future, and Mullen points out that Blish nailed it. The religious movement of the Witnesses fits too, because Spengler predicted that a “second religiousness” among the masses always comes along with Caesarism.

But Blish went further. After the Western civilization collapses, a new culture is born in the galaxy: the Earthmanist Culture. And Mullen traces its entire life story through Spengler’s stages.

The Vegan War produces the founding myth. Admiral Hrunta becomes the hero figure, the Charlemagne or Arthur of this new culture. His empire marks the feudal period. When that empire breaks apart and reforms, you get the transition to aristocracy. Earth plays the role of the king who allies with the middle class (the Okie cities) to suppress the aristocrats (the various space empires and duchies). The collapse of the germanium standard triggers revolution. The March on Earth is the 1789 of Earthman history.

It all maps onto Spengler’s template. Feudalism, aristocracy, absolutism, revolution, Caesarism. The same cycle, played out among the stars.

The Cultural Morphologists

This is where things get fun and also a bit silly. In the novels, “cultural morphologists” are people who studied Spengler’s work and turned it into a practical tool. They can supposedly look at any civilization, figure out what stage it’s in, and predict what it will do next.

Mullen is pretty honest about this. He calls it “rather absurd.” And he’s right. Spengler himself never imagined his work could be used that way. Saying a civilization will eventually go through revolution is like saying a baby will eventually grow old. True, but not exactly useful for making specific predictions about what happens next Tuesday.

And here’s the funny part: Mullen points out that the cultural morphologists in the books never actually practice their trade in any meaningful way. The stories turn on coincidence and individual decisions, not grand cultural predictions. You could delete every reference to cultural morphology from the text and the plots wouldn’t change. It would only take removing a handful of sentences.

So the Spenglerian framework is, in some ways, window dressing. But it’s really good window dressing. It gives the series an intellectual weight that most space opera doesn’t have. It makes you feel like you’re reading a history, not just an adventure story.

The Honest Author

One of my favorite things about the afterword is Blish’s footnotes. He doesn’t pretend to be perfect. He straight up admits that the four novels were written “roughly in the order III, I, IV, II over a period of 15 years” while he was also writing other books. Inconsistencies crept in. He fixed some that Mullen pointed out, but where he disagreed, he left them in.

There’s a great moment where Mullen argues that the Bureaucratic State can’t really be a separate Spenglerian culture from the West. Blish responds in a footnote: “A wholly valid argument. Nevertheless I have not changed the text.” He explains that he was trying to make a different point, about how civilizations in conflict become more like each other. He knew Spengler would have considered this trivial, but he thought it was worth saying anyway.

That’s an author who respects his readers enough to show his work. He’s not hiding behind the fiction. He’s saying: yes, I bent the philosophy to serve the story, and here’s why.

The Triumph of Time

Mullen ends with one final Spenglerian connection. The title of the last novel, The Triumph of Time, may have been inspired by a passage on the very last page of The Decline of the West: “Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man.”

That’s a beautiful sentence. And it captures something about what Blish was doing with the whole series. All those flying cities, all those centuries of politics and war and commerce, all that history stretching across the galaxy. In the end, time wins. The universe itself comes to an end. No Spenglerian cycle can run forever.

Why This Matters for Reading the Books

You don’t need to know any of this to enjoy Cities in Flight. The stories work as adventure and as science fiction without any philosophical background.

But if you want to understand why the books feel different from most space opera, why they have that weight and that sense of inevitability, this is the reason. Blish wasn’t just making up a future. He was following a template that a German philosopher laid out a century ago, a template that says civilizations are born and die in patterns as regular as the seasons.

The explicit Spenglerianism might be “highly dubious” in its details, as Mullen says. But it gives Cities in Flight something that most science fiction series lack: a backbone. A sense that the story isn’t just one thing happening after another, but part of a pattern that stretches back to the beginning of human civilization and forward to its end.

And that’s a pretty good reason to write an afterword about it.

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