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.
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.
In Part 5, we saw the jungle of Okie cities gathering near a red dwarf star, desperate for work. An Acolyte entrepreneur showed up offering terrible wages, things got violent, and Lieutenant Lerner’s cops accidentally blew up a bystander city. Amalfi watched it all and decided it was time to visit Buda-Pesht, the King’s city, in person. He brought Hazleton and Dee along. And now things get political.
Three hundred flying cities are parked around a dying red dwarf star. Most of them can barely keep their lights on. Welcome to the Okie jungle. Think of it as a hobo camp in space, except the hobos are entire cities, and the camp rules are written by whoever has the most power to burn.
The chapter is called “Murphy,” and if you know Murphy’s Law, you already know how this is going to go. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong. And then it gets worse.
This is the big one. Chapter 4 of Earthman, Come Home is called “He,” and it’s the longest chapter in the entire novel. “He” is a planet, not a person. And what happens on that planet is one of the most ambitious things Amalfi and New York City have ever attempted. They move a whole world.
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.
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.