Cities in Flight Retelling: Earthman Come Home Part 1 - New York in Space
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.
If the first two novels set the stage, this is where the real story begins.
The Prologue: How We Got Here
Blish opens with a history lesson. It reads like an excerpt from a future textbook, and honestly it is one of the best pieces of world-building in the whole series.
Here’s the short version. Space flight started as a weapon during the collapse of Western civilization. Early explorers got as far as Jupiter using old-style engines. Then on Jupiter, scientists confirmed the Blackett-Dirac equations, which linked magnetism, gravity, and rotation. From those equations came the spindizzy. One device that gave you antigravity, faster-than-light travel, and a meteor shield, all in one package.
The West used spindizzies to scatter colonists across nearby stars. But here’s the thing: they never figured out that the spindizzy could lift anything. Not just ships. Anything. Whole buildings. Whole cities.
Then the West collapsed. Not from invasion, but from becoming the thing it feared. In trying to fight Soviet-style control, Western governments built their own thought police, their own surveillance systems, their own restrictions on free thinking. Eventually you couldn’t tell the two systems apart. And since the Soviets had more practice running that kind of government, they absorbed the West without firing a shot.
The new Bureaucratic State banned space flight. Even physicists couldn’t think about it without getting caught by the thought police. But they couldn’t ban atomic research, because the state’s power depended on it. And hidden inside that atomic research was the math that led right back to the spindizzy. Pure mathematicians rediscovered it by accident, and they didn’t even know they were being revolutionary.
Space flight came back. And this time, people realized the spindizzy could lift cities. Factories went first, chasing mineral deposits around the solar system. Then whole cities followed. The first Okie city was a thorium processing plant that just never came back. After that, the exodus couldn’t be stopped. Earth’s cities became migrant workers in space, interstellar hobos looking for jobs on distant planets.
Two more things made this possible. Anti-agathic drugs stopped aging, so people could survive the long flights between stars. And germanium became the universal currency of space trade, giving the nomad cities something stable to earn and spend.
The Bureaucratic State withered away. Earth became a garden planet. Old bureaucrats went there to die. Nobody else bothered.
Chapter 1: Utopia
Now we meet Amalfi in the present. He steps onto the belfry of City Hall, which is also the bridge of a spaceship, which is also still the same granite ledge from 1850. The city is Manhattan, flying through the void, and Amalfi has been mayor for over five hundred years.
He’s old in the way that only someone on anti-agathic drugs can be old. He remembers when cities couldn’t fly. He was 117 when New York left Earth in the year 3111. His first city manager got shot by the City Fathers (the city’s governing computers) for breaking a contract. His current city manager, Mark Hazleton, is a “youngster” of less than 400 years.
Amalfi looks up at a yellow sun and decides to land. The city needs food. Their algae tanks mutated after passing through a radiation field, and crop yields are dropping fast. If they don’t find supplies soon, they’ll starve before reaching the next star.
But there’s a problem. This star system has two inhabited planets, and they’re at war. One planet is Utopia, settled by an ancient democratic sect called the Hamiltonians. The other is a leftover from the Hruntan Empire, a military dictatorship. They’ve been fighting each other for a century. And now Earth’s police have shown up to absorb both planets, and they’ve told New York to get lost.
Hazleton has a plan. Hide behind a gas giant, wait for the police to focus on the stronger planet, then sneak down to the weaker one for supplies. It’s risky and possibly illegal, but the city is hungry.
While they hide, a warship from Utopia finds them. The Utopians send a representative. And here’s where Hazleton’s judgment slips: the representative is a young woman, and Hazleton is immediately distracted by her. Amalfi notices. He files it away.
The Utopian woman explains their situation. They’ve lost the secret of interstellar flight. They’ve been fighting the Hruntans with cleverness and camouflage rather than firepower. They’re desperate. They thought Earth would rescue them, but Earth came as a conqueror instead.
Amalfi sees a deal. The city needs oil and raw materials. Utopia has oil but needs technical help. They negotiate: New York will land on Utopia, mine germanium (the universal currency, though he doesn’t mention that part), and provide some technical assistance. Everybody gets something.
But Amalfi is careful. He won’t share weapons technology. He won’t hand over anything that could let these backward planets suddenly become dangerous. He’s thinking several moves ahead.
The city lands on Utopia, and it’s grim. The planet has been bombarded with fission weapons for seventy years. Whole continents are radioactive. Cities are white-hot craters. People live underground. The air is barely breathable at night. It’s a hellscape that Utopians call home because they have nothing else.
Captain Savage of Utopia explains how they’ve survived: fake installations, dummy weather patterns, tricking the Hruntans into landing in kill zones. It’s basically psychological warfare combined with camouflage. And freedom, he says. They fight harder because they’re free.
Amalfi isn’t impressed by the freedom argument. “Nobody is ever free,” he tells Savage. A wartime government tends toward dictatorship no matter what ideals it started with. The Utopians are fighting for steak tomorrow, same as the Hruntans. A difference that makes no difference is no difference.
Savage walks away offended. And Hazleton has disappeared with the Utopian girl.
Then things go wrong fast. The Earth police finish with the Hruntans much quicker than expected and start closing in. Amalfi orders emergency takeoff. The city powers up its spindizzies. And Hazleton calls in from the planet surface, saying he’s found something the city needs, saying he likes it here.
Amalfi gives him a choice. Do you want off? Hazleton says no, but also can’t stop talking. The countdown runs. Amalfi is physically sick from the g-forces as the spindizzies spin up. He barely gets the words out.
“Mark, I haven’t time. You made your choice.”
And then: “Spin!”
The city launches into space, leaving Hazleton behind on a radioactive planet in the middle of a war zone.
What’s Happening Here
This first chapter sets up everything. Amalfi is not a nice guy. He’s practical, experienced, and ruthless when he has to be. He genuinely cares about Hazleton, but when it comes down to one person versus the city, the city wins. Always.
The Utopia chapter also shows Blish’s favorite theme: dead civilizations that don’t know they’re dead. Both the Hamiltonians and the Hruntans are fighting over ideologies that expired centuries ago. They’re ghosts arguing about which ghost is more alive.
And Amalfi sees this clearly. He’s an Okie. He has no ties, no faith, no homeland. That makes him free in a way Savage will never understand, but it also makes him lonely in a way Savage will never feel.
The chapter ends on a gut punch. Amalfi had to leave the closest thing he had to a son on a dying planet. And the city flies on, because that’s what cities do.
Previous: A Life for the Stars Part 4