Ennui at Zero Minus One Hour
John Amalfi is a thousand years old and has run out of things to want. That is the trouble the book opens with, and it is a stranger trouble than the genre usually risks: not tyranny, not scarcity, not even grief, but the flattening that comes when an interstellar wanderer finally gets somewhere permanent. New Earth is stable, prosperous, self-governing. Amalfi hates it. "What he missed, after all, was not space, but instability itself." He is not suicidal, not oppressed, not even unhappy in any diagnosable sense — he is bored the way an eternal light bulb is bored, screwed into its socket and forgotten. The City Fathers, warming up, hand him a William James quotation from 1897 about victories so complete they curdle into insipidity, and he recognizes himself in it instantly. This is a different failure mode than the comfort traps I've catalogued elsewhere in this collection — no one is medicating Amalfi into complacency. The problem isn't pleasure. It's the absence of anything left to be unsettled by.
Blish escalates from private ennui to cosmic teardown without much apology, and the machinery he builds to do it is where the book gets genuinely odd. The Hevians have been listening to the universe's background noise and discovered it has two voices: every hydrogen atom born into ordinary matter has a twin, an antimatter atom, dying somewhere else, running backward in time. Two four-dimensional continua, unwinding in opposite directions "like two millstones," due to collide at a shared, stress-free point Blish calls the Ginnungagap. Whoever survives that collision by even five microseconds gets to imprint the reborn universe with whatever they were, philosophically, at the moment of impact. This is 1966, a year after Penzias and Wilson found the microwave background and made steady-state cosmology mostly untenable, and Blish is still running an oscillating, cyclical model through the back door — matter-antimatter symmetry, monoblocs, a universe that dies only to be born pregnant with the last thoughts of whoever was standing at its exact center. Contemporary cyclic cosmology — ekpyrotic models, conformal cyclic cosmology — arrives at something structurally similar by a completely different, and far more rigorous, route. Blish's math is decoration. His instinct that endings and beginnings might be the same event witnessed from two directions was not wrong so much as early and unaccountable.
Where the book puts its actual faith is the more interesting tell. I've noted, writing about *Tau Zero*, that some hard-SF endings bet everything on the physics doing the emotional work for you — the equations carry the awe, the characters just watch. Blish makes the opposite wager. The five microseconds at dead center aren't won by better engineering; they're won by what kind of people you were when you got there. Gifford Bonner, dying, gets the last line worth quoting: "The death of one man is just as funny as the death of a universe. Don't repudiate the last laugh of all." That's not physics. That's temperament, offered up as the thing that survives annihilation and reseeds the next go-round. It's a strange thing to smuggle into a novel that spends chapters on stress tensors and neutral zones — the suggestion that Spengler's deterministic wheel of rise and fall might, at the one point where all the stresses cancel out, actually answer to the character of whoever's standing there. Blish, notably, doesn't hide this framework the way most SF hides its philosophy of history. *Cities in Flight* appends its own Spenglerian scaffolding directly to the text, chapter by chapter, as if the novel wanted to be caught reasoning.
The other half of that scaffolding — the jehad, Jorn the Apostle's Warriors of God rising against a scientific civilization in what Spengler called the "second religiousness" — reads with a different weather now than it must have in 1966. Blish wrote it as an allegory with a fairly settled enemy in mind: bureaucratic rigidity, or the USSR, or both. Six decades on, the shape of the anxiety hasn't gone away, it's just lost its address. The threat to a stable, scientific order turning out to be fervor rather than famine is not a period detail anymore; it's closer to a standing condition. Blish thought he knew which side of that fight civilization was supposed to be on. The book that follows Amalfi into a dying universe is less sure the distinction holds all the way down.
What does a civilization actually pass on, in the five microseconds it's given to matter?