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.

Supposed to be.

The Prologue: A History of Everything

Blish opens with two things. First, a passage from the Koran about the day the earth will be shaken and the mountains crumbled to dust. About how no man lives forever, and how every soul will taste death. It sets the tone immediately. This book is about endings. Big ones.

Then comes a long excerpt from a fictional future history book, “The Milky Way: Five Cultural Portraits” by someone called Acreff-Monales. This is Blish at his most ambitious. In a few dense pages, he lays out the entire timeline of human galactic civilization.

Here’s the short version. Earth discovered the spindizzy around 2019. Colonists fought the Vegan Tyranny. Admiral Hrunta committed war crimes and declared himself Emperor of Space. Earth’s government collapsed. The Okie cities spread across the galaxy doing contract work for centuries. Then came the Empty Years, when nobody was really in charge.

New York, our city, launched in 3111. It outlasted the Hruntan Empire. It outplayed the Vegan orbital fort that tried one last grab for power. And by 3978, Amalfi had done something nobody expected. He took the whole city out of the galaxy. Left the Milky Way behind and flew to the Greater Magellanic Cloud.

Back home, Earth passed the anti-Okie bill in 3976, which basically killed the Okie way of life. So Amalfi got out just in time. New York colonized a planet in 3998 and named it New Earth in 3999.

But here’s what makes this prologue special. The historian mentions something called the Ginnangu-Gap. A total, universal physical cataclysm. Something that interrupted the growth of a new civilization called the Web of Hercules. And in this moment of universal chaos, Earthmen reappeared one final time to write themselves a “drastic and fruitful” exit from history.

That is some foreshadowing. Blish is telling you right up front: something catastrophic is coming, and these people will be at the center of it.

Chapter 1: New Earth

Now we meet Amalfi again. And he is miserable.

Not sick. Not dying. Just bored out of his mind. He’s over a thousand years old, and for the first time in his entire life, he has nothing to do. The city is grounded and abandoned. It sits there in the rain like a rusting monument. Nobody goes in anymore except to use the City Fathers, those massive computers that used to run everything.

The New Earthmen don’t care about the old days. The original Okies who came on the flight look back on their wandering years with distant distaste. Their children and grandchildren see the grounded city the way you might look at a Viking longboat in a museum. Interesting, sure. But who would want to ride in one?

Nobody even cares what happened back in the Milky Way. Millions of radio transmissions are pouring in from the home galaxy, but sorting through them would take years and nobody wants the job. The Greater Magellanic Cloud is pulling away from the Milky Way at 150 miles per second. People’s eyes are pointed outward now.

Amalfi wanders into the old city and fires up the City Fathers. He’s trying to set them to work analyzing those transmissions from home. He doesn’t even know why. While the machines warm up, they spit out a quote from William James, written in 1897: if all the suffering of history only produced a race of contented, boring people, then maybe it would have been better to lose the battle entirely.

That quote hits Amalfi right in the chest. Because that’s exactly how he feels. All those centuries of struggle and danger and ingenuity, and the result is… this. A comfortable, stable planet full of people raising pets and children and not caring about anything beyond the next harvest.

Then Jake shows up. Jake is the city’s old astronomer, a cranky little man who has been with the city since around 3500. He came looking for the computation section because he has a problem to solve. There’s a new star that popped up just beyond the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, and it’s “behaving outrageously.” Jake is delighted by it. It’s the prettiest theoretical puzzle he’s had in two centuries.

Amalfi tries to interest Jake in his idea: rehabilitate part of the city, get it flying again, go look for work in the Cloud. Jake is not interested at all. He never liked the Okie life. He just tolerated it because it gave him a floating observatory and a paycheck. Now that he has a choice? No thanks.

The city itself can’t fly anyway. Two spindizzies got fused beyond repair during the landing on the Blasted Heath back in 3944. There are no graving docks on New Earth to fix them. The city was built as one piece on a granite keel. You can’t just cut off a section and send it up.

Amalfi knows all this. He resolves to try anyway.

Dinner with the Hazletons

Amalfi goes to see Mark Hazleton, his old city manager, and Dee, Hazleton’s wife. They have a huge family now. Children, grandchildren, a whole clan. They hold a big dinner, and Amalfi sits through it while small Hazletons make their farewell speeches to “the great man.”

One kid catches his eye. A boy named Webster Hazleton, about fourteen, who stares at Amalfi the whole evening like he’s memorizing him. “I hope to be seeing you again on a matter of the greatest importance,” the boy says, like he’s been rehearsing it for weeks. Strange kid.

After the children leave, Amalfi lays it out for Mark and Dee. He wants to get part of the city flying again. He wants to leave.

Hazleton thinks he’s lost his mind. Dee compares him to the Flying Dutchman, sailing under a curse, going nowhere. Amalfi doesn’t disagree. He says he wouldn’t mind becoming a legend. At least that would give him a role to play again.

The real argument comes down to this: Amalfi is still technically the mayor. He rigged the election to get the job. He outmaneuvered both Hazleton and Carrel. But now the office means nothing. Nobody asks him to do anything. Mark is the one actually running the Cloud. Amalfi tells him it’s time to make it official. Take the title. Let the old man go.

Hazleton can see the logic. But he’s distressed. Not because of politics. Because his old friend is choosing a dangerous exit for no good reason. Dee says nothing, which is maybe worse. She has reasons to fight this, but she holds back. The evening ends cold and formal.

Amalfi walks home through a city full of pets. Dogs that jump on everyone. Alien creatures called svengalis from Altair IV that lie in the street hypnotizing passersby and spraying euphoric mist when stepped on. Cats clawing at cloaks in the dark. Singing birds everywhere. Amalfi hates all of it.

He reaches his house just before the rain hits. Steps through his personal spindizzy shield, the “spindilly” as the locals call it. Makes a drink. Stands in his square, uncompromising house and wonders what’s wrong with him.

Then the spindizzy hums. Someone has come through the field. Someone who has never visited at this hour, never come alone before. And Amalfi knows exactly who it is.

Blish ends the chapter right there. We don’t find out who. Not yet.

What’s Really Going On

Two things are happening in this opening. On the surface, it’s a character study. Amalfi is a man built for crisis, living in peace, and it’s killing him slowly. A thousand years of momentum and nowhere left to go. He’s like a shark that has to keep swimming or die, and someone put him in an aquarium.

But underneath that, Blish has planted something bigger. That star Jake is studying, the one “behaving outrageously” beyond the Lesser Magellanic Cloud? That’s not just a random scientific curiosity. And the prologue’s mention of the Ginnangu-Gap, a universal physical cataclysm? That’s not decoration.

Something is wrong with the universe. And these bored, retired city-flyers are about to find out what it is.

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