Scholium Criteria

The criterion for inclusion of a text in the New Testament was whether this text proclaimed the Resurrection of Christ in fulfilment of scripture, not whether the text was otherwise consistent with other texts in the canon. 

A comparable criterion applies to James Blish's Haertal Scholium. A story or novel may refer either to Haertel himself or to some other element of an earlier narrative while not necessarily maintaining full consistency with every other such additional instalment. Thus, "A Dusk of Idols" and Mission To The Heart Stars both refer back to The Star Dwellers but are not necessarily mutually consistent. Haertel and Garrard exist in the past of a story where a telepathic "Central Empire" occupies the galactic centre and also in the past of a novel where the non-telepathic Hegemony of Malis occupies that same volume of space.

Story elements even extend beyond the Scholium:

in "A Case of Conscience," which became Book One of the Scholium novel, A Case Of Conscience, the planet Lithia exists in 2049;

in Book Four of the non-Scholium collection, The Seedling Stars, Lithia still exists millennia later;

in Book Two of A Case Of Conscience, Lithia explodes in 2050.

The Dirac transmitter:

first appeared in Blish's Okie series;

was developed more fully in the independent story, "Beep";

was not only developed further yet again but also incorporated into the Haertel Scholium when "Beep" was expanded as The Quincunx Of Time and linked by a Dirac message to Midsummer Century.

Einstein and Mars exist in alternative fictional futures. So likewise may Haertel, Lithia and the Dirac transmitter.

Haertel's Significance In Three Timelines II

See: Haertel's Significance In Three Timelines

Publication Order

The Star Dwellers (1961)

Mission To The Heart Stars (1965)

Welcome To Mars (1966)

Midsummer Century (1972)

The Quincunx Of Time (1973)

Only the first, second and fifth of these Haertel Scholium novels present a scenario of interstellar civilization with regular use of the Haertel overdrive. Mission To The Heart Stars, a direct sequel to The Star Dwellers, culminates when "Angels" (energy beings) and Earthmen begin to lead an alliance of other intelligent species, including dolphins, beadmungen and the feline Aaa, against the Heart Stars federation, the Hegemony of Malis, whereas, in The Quincunx Of Time, Earth alone, monopolizing the instantaneous Dirac transmitter with its messages from the future, leads a utopian intergalactic civilization. If the Haertel Scholium had comprised a single linear sequence, then the Martian dune-cats in Welcome To Mars might have taken the place of the Aaa in the two Jack Loftus novels.

In Welcome To Mars:

Einstein maintained that gravity was not a force but a condition of space and tried to prove that it lacked polarity;

Milne's relativity incorporated Einstein's;

in the late twentieth century, Adolph ("Dolph") Haertel, aged seventeen, studied Milne, Dingle and any other theoreticians of gravity;

Haertel discovered that gravity has polarity and can be easily manipulated by working with it instead of against it.

In James Blish's Cities In Flight, control of gravity (with polarity) leads to a faster-than-light interstellar drive. Is this what happens in the Haertel Scholium, at least in that branch of the Scholium represented by Welcome To Mars? Alternatively, one Haertel discovers anti-gravity and another discovers FTL. Texts bear alternative interpretations.

In The Quincunx Of Time:

Haertel, aged seventeen, assumed that the geometry of ultimate particles is Pythagorean, not Euclidean, applying to points, not to lines, and thus transformed particle physics;

Haertel's assumption generated a Unified Field Theory and abolished both the equivalency principle and most of quantum mechanics except the part that is necessary for the Dirac transmitter;

Thor Wald, inventor of the transmitter, jocularly suggests that Haertel "'...must have been God...'" (James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1973), CHAPTER SIX, p. 67)

The Quincunx Of Time follows Welcome To Mars by stating that Haertel did something important at the age of seventeen. However, he either discovered anti-gravity or assumed Pythagorean particle geometry. These seem to be completely different. 

Radio, Dirac And Cats

James Blish's Haertel Scholium begins with Welcome To Mars and ends with Midsummer Century.

See: One Story Grows Into An Exotic Future History.

In Welcome To Mars, Dolph Haertel, stranded on Mars in the twentieth century, unexpectedly receives a radio signal originating from somewhere else on that planet whereas, in Midsummer Century, John Martels, who has been time-projected from 1985 to 25,000 AD and who is now embodied in a sentient computer, unexpectedly receives a message transmitted as a Dirac beep. These two mysterious receptions suggest a bond between these two characters although they are not in any direct contact with each other. The Scholium is all about faster means of travel and communication. Haertel and Martels are indirectly linked by Thor Wald who reveres Haertel and invents the Dirac transmitter.

The Scholium includes two cat-like intelligent species, one on Mars in the two Mars instalments and another on an extra-solar planet in the two Jack Loftus novels. If the Scholium or selected parts of it had been edited into a linear series, then maybe these two species would have been conflated.

The Haertel Scholium

James Blish's Haertel Scholium comprises:

(i) four stories collected in Galactic Cluster, the first featuring Adolph Haertel;

(ii) five novels - one about Haertel, the others referring to him;

(iii) four more shorter works, three stories collected in Anywhen and the short novel, Midsummer Century.

(i) A linear trilogy:

"Common Time"

"Nor Iron Bars"

"This Earth of Hours"

- and an offshoot, "Beep," which is a further development of the idea of the instantaneous Dirac transmitter which had been introduced in Blish's Cities In Flight Tetralogy.

(ii) (a) Three juvenile novels:

Welcome To Mars, about Haertel;

The Star Dwellers and Mission To The Heart Stars, both about Jack Loftus.

(b) A Case Of Conscience, which is Volume III of the After Such Knowledge Trilogy.

(c) The Quincunx Of Time, a (still short) novelization of "Beep."

(iii) Each of the four remaining shorter works connects with one of the novels:

"No Jokes on Mars" with Welcome To Mars;

"A Dusk of Idols" with The Star Dwellers;

"A Style in Treason" and Midsummer Century with The Quincunx Of Time.

Midsummer Century, written while Blish was expanding "Beep," is a companion volume to The Quincunx... The two volumes cross-refer and are linked by a Dirac message.

Everything comes together.

Six Narratives

James Blish's future historical and other related writings present six long narratives:

from the discovery of anti-agathics and antigravity to the creation of new universes;

from the development of pantropy to Adapted Men throughout the galaxy;

from Haertel's tree hut to first contact with the telepathic Central Empire;

from first contact with the Angels to long term dealings with the Heart Stars;

from Martels' radio telescope and Wald's invention of the Dirac transmitter to an expanding intergalactic civilization and mystical immortality;

from Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century to contact with Lithia in the mid-twenty-first century.

Bacon and Einstein are in many timelines, Haertel in four, the Dirac transmitter in two and Lithia in two.

Haertel And Wald

Adolph Haertel, discoverer of anti-gravity and inventor of the Haertel overdrive, appears in Welcome to Mars, which has a short sequel, "No Jokes on Mars," and in "Common Time," which is the opening story of the Galactic Cluster trilogy, and Haertel is mentioned:

in The Star Dwellers and its direct sequel, Mission To The Heart Stars, although not in its alternative sequel, "A Dusk of Idols";

in A Case Of Conscience, which is Volume III of the After Such Knowledge Trilogy;

in The Quincunx Of Time, which forms a loose trilogy with "A Style in Treason" and Midsummer Century.

Thor Wald, inventor of the Dirac transmitter and of a mathematical metalanguage, appears in The Quincunx Of Time and is mentioned in Midsummer Century.

In several timelines, Haertel succeeds Einstein. In one of those timelines, Wald, with access to many future scientific paradigms through the Dirac beep, shows that the structure of science makes it impossible to decide between the paradigms because it is one of the paradigms. However, I though that all the paradigms existed within the structure of science which is not a particular theory but a way of testing any theory?

Martian dune-cats appear in Welcome To Mars and in "No Jokes on Mars" and were referenced in a note to an early draft of "How Beautiful With Banners" although that story is set on Titan. Thus, these three works might have formed an even looser trilogy or at least a triad. Ideas proliferate. In the Haertel Scholium, Blish was not bound by a linear history but series intended as linear future histories develop their own internal inconsistencies in any case.

Interstellar Communicators

Ultrawave/ultraphone: FTL but not instantaneous.
CirCon: instantaneous.
Dirac transmitter in Cities In Flight: instantaneous.
Dirac transmitter in The Quincunx Of Time: instantaneous but also receiving messages from the past and future.

The Angels and the Heart Stars also have some means of instantaneous communication.

See the previous post. The Quincunx Of Time, "A Style in Treason" and Midsummer Century are set in different periods of a single Haertel overdrive timeline. All three have ultrawave. Quincunx and Century also have the Dirac. "Treason" seems not to have it although Quincunx contradicts this. Apparent contradictions are to be expected, especially since there is a Traitors' Guild in "Treason."

Interstellar Travel

James Blish conceptualizes requirements or adjuncts of interstellar travel:

the spindizzy or the Haertel overdrive and its successors;

the ultrawave/ultraphone, the Dirac transmitter, the CirCon radio;

the germanium-based Oc dollar, the Traitors's Guild;

the anti-agathics;

pantropy.

Cities In Flight has the spindizzy, the ultraphone, the Dirac transmitter, the Oc dollar and the anti-agathics;

The Seedling Stars has an unspecified overdrive, the ultraphone, the Oc dollar and pantropy;

The Quincunx Of Time has the Haertel overdrive, the ultraphone and the newly invented Dirac transmitter;

"A Style in Treason" has the Imaginary Drive, the ultraphone and the Traitors' Guild (an interstellar bourse);

Midsummer Century has ultrawave and Dirac;

A Case Of Conscience has the Haertel overdrive and the newly invented CirCon (circum-continuum) radio;

Narratives diverge. Anti-agathics entailed the possibility of some characters living until the end of the universe which, however, for fictional convenience, was brought unexpectedly close to the present whereas pantropy entailed the possibility of Adapted Men inhabiting the entire galaxy millennia hence.

Although the Dirac transmitter was introduced in the first written Okie (Cities In Flight) story, the propagation of Dirac pulses in a four-dimensional continuum had consequences that did not fit into that series so the idea was developed more fully elsewhere. The stories of the discoveries of the spindizzy and of anti-agathics were incorporated into Volume I of Cities In Flight whereas the invention of the Dirac transmitter is described in The Quincunx Of Time. 

Freedom In Two Haertel Overdrive Futures

The Dirac Transmitter Future
"'...the more you know, the wider your field of possible operations becomes, and the more fluid and dynamic a society you need. How could a rigid society expand to other star systems, let alone other galaxies? It couldn't be done.'"
-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), AN EPILOGUE, p. 106.

"'...we know that the consciousness of the observer is the only free thing in the universe. Wouldn't we look foolish trying to control that, when our working physics shows that it's impossible to do so? That's why the Service is in no sense a thought police. We're interested only in acts. We're an Event Police.'" (ibid.)

(The abomination of a Thought Police exists in 1984 and in the Bureaucratic State period of Blish's Cities In Flight. The latter bans even thinking about spaceflight as Unearthly Activities but cannot ban atomic research...)

The Heart Stars Future
In the Heart Stars federation, even the dominant Malans:

"...are slaves to their own laws and the machines that interpret them. All these planets are also very low on curiosity, except in very limited areas, and they make sure to keep those areas harmless.'"
-James Blish, Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), CHAPTER ELEVEN, p. 123.

Earthmen learn that they must not join the Heart Stars federation but build a free alliance against it.

Unity

James Blish's Haertel Scholium presents not a linear narrative but four alternative futures, characterized respectively by:

microcosmic and interstellar telepathy;

the extrasolar Lithians;

star-dwelling energy beings called "Angels" and the Heart Stars federation;

the Dirac transmitter by means of which a message transmitted in 25,000 A.D. in Midsummer Century is received in 2091 A.D. in The Quincunx Of Time.

Garrard, test flying the Haertel overdrive in "Common Time," lives in a time common to the four futures. Before Garrard's test flight, Mars had been explored by Haertel in Welcome To Mars and colonized in "No Jokes on Mars" and the Martian dune-cats had been mentioned in an earlier draft although not in the final text of "How Beautiful With Banners." Fictional realms include those that were envisaged but did not make it into print - or onto screen in the case of proposed film adaptations (scroll down) of Welcome To Mars and Cities In Flight.

A Case Of Conscience, about the Lithians, is Volume III of Blish's After Such Knowledge Trilogy about the question whether the desire for secular knowledge is evil. Volume I, Doctor Mirabilis, is a historical novel about Roger Bacon, the discoverer of scientific method, who is thus the precursor of later scientists including Einstein, Haertel and Thor Wald, the inventor of the Dirac transmitter. Volume II, Black Easter and The Day After Judgment, is a contemporary fantasy about magicians conjuring demons.

In The Beep, I contrast Wald and his colleagues with the magicians.

In Angels And Demons, I compare "Angels" with demons.

In Communication, I summarize the theme of communication in the Haertel Scholium, Cities In Flight and The Seedling Stars.

In Darkness And Optimism and Darkness And Optimism II, I compare the conclusions of the works in the Haertel Scholium.

What emerges is a sense of the unity of Blish's major works.

Communication

In the Haertel overdrive futures:

telepathy unites the Central Empire;

the Lithians have a Message Tree and the CirCon radio is instantaneous;

the Dirac transmitter will unite an expanding intergalactic civilization although, in an intermediate period, High Earth may or may not be Old Earth, the Traitors' Guild motto is "Mundus vult decipi," "the world wishes to be deceived," and the Green Exarch is served by shape-shifters;

the Angels communicate on a universal scale -

"Like sparks in a column of smoke, the discussion whirled and danced away throughout the galaxy and throughout the universe..."
-James Blish, Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), p. 127.

In Cities In Flight, the Web of Hercules leaves a record that is read in a subsequent universe.

In The Seedling Stars, many original human beings remain prejudiced against Adapted Men, i.e., in this case, a lack of communication.

The Haertel Scholium Connections

A Martian Diptych
Welcome To Mars and "No Jokes on Mars" have a common setting.

The Galactic Cluster Trilogy
"This Earth of Hours" refers back to "Nor Iron Bars" which refers back to "Common Time."

The Heart Stars Trilogy
Both Mission To The Heart Stars and "A Dusk of Idols" refer back to The Star Dwellers.

The Quincunx Trilogy
Midsummer Century refers back to The Quincunx Of Time which refers forward to "A Style In Treason" and to Midsummer Century.

Characters
Adolph Haertel is in Welcome To Mars and "Common Time."
Jack Loftus is in The Star Dwellers and Mission To The Heart Stars.
Thor Wald is in The Quincunx Of Time and mentioned in Midsummer Century.
In Quincunx, Wald invents the Dirac transmitter which exists in a different form in Cities In Flight.

The Haertel Scholium

A recent reference to Dirac made me think about and rethink James Blish's Haertel Scholium. An omnibus collection of the Scholium would comprise eleven works, a two part prequel/prologue/prelude, Welcome To Mars and "No Jokes On Mars," followed by three trilogies:

The Galactic Cluster Trilogy
"Common Time"
"Nor Iron Bars"
"This Earth Of Hours"

The Heart Stars Trilogy
The Star Dwellers
Mission To The Heart Stars
"A Dusk Of Idols"

The Quincunx Trilogy
The Quincunx Of Time
"A Style In Treason"
Midsummer Century

In "This Earth Of Hours," the Terrestrial Matriarchy must contend with the Central Empire of the galaxy;
in the Heart Stars trilogy, the UN and the star-dwelling Angels must contend with the Heart Stars federation;
in "A Style In Treason," High Earth must contend with the Green Exarchy;
in The Quincunx Of Time, Earth, armed with the Dirac transmitter, builds its own intergalactic civilization;
in a twelfth Haertel Scholium work, A Case Of Conscience, which is Volume III of the After Such Knowledge Trilogy, the UN must cope with the planet Lithia which, in accordance with this novel's place in the ASK Trilogy, is a third historical example of the question whether the quest for secular knowledge is evil.

Dirac

In "Nor Iron Bars" by James Blish (Galactic Cluster, London, 1963), a new faster than light drive:

"...involved giving the whole ship negative mass...Only a physicist who knew Dirac holes well enough to call them 'Pam' would have thought of the notion...'" (p. 63)

It took me a long time to learn that Paul Dirac's initials were PAM.

The physicist, Gordon Arpe, who thought of the negative mass drive did not know Dirac holes as well as he thought. His idea was that the ship, no longer a material object, would accelerate away from Earth, surpassing the speed of light. Instead, unable to exist in the positive mass macrocosm, it collapses into the microcosm where, having some of the properties of a Dirac hole, it is echoed by an electron elsewhere in the universe so that, when it is returned to positive mass and thus to the macrocosm, it re-enters the macrocosm at its other location much further away from Earth than intended, so far away that locating the Sun is problematic.

The ship can cross interstellar distances by jumping in and out of the microcosm but expands and loses air with each jump so that it soon becomes unreuseable. Another means of interstellar travel has to be found. This story could easily have been written as a comedy.

The ship's passengers include the planetary explorer Hammersmith so the story "Beep"/The Quincunx Of Time, referring to a planet called Hammersmith, can be regarded as a sequel. In "Beep"/Quincunx, electrons echoing each other are used not for interstellar travel but for instantaneous communication by means of the Dirac transmitter which is found to receive all such messages transmitted from any point in the four dimensional continuum, past, present or future.

Thus, Blish fully explores every possible fictional application of Dirac holes.

A Style In Treason

James Blish's speculative hard science fiction (sf) addresses the questions: how can human beings live indefinitely, control gravity, travel faster than light (FTL), colonize other planets and communicate instantaneously or telepathically? Also, in particular works: what is life and should society be stable or dynamic?

(Incidentally, They Shall Have Stars prefigures The Star Dwellers:

("...there was no logical reason to rule [life] out even on the Sun - some animated flame no one would recognize as life..." (Year 2018!, London, 1964, p. 138))

Despite its interstellar setting, "A Style In Treason" concentrates not on hard sf but on colourful images and descriptions and exotic settings. It was written as a pastiche of Jack Vance who wrote the kind of sf in which technological advances like FTL are merely assumed, not carefully rationalized. The FTL drive in "A Style In Treason" is called the Imaginary Drive as an auctorial comment on the implausibility of this standard sf prop.

A battle is described as:

"...like a raid by the twenty-fifth century upon the thirteenth, as imagined by someone in the twentieth - a truly dreamlike sensation." (Anywhen, New York, 1970, p. 43)

- thus not intended to be taken seriously as either sociological or technological extrapolation. The battle includes ornithopters, wing-flapping aircraft, which are also to be found in Dune.

Sometimes, when reading a fictional narrative, we do not yet fully understand the context or motivations of the characters' actions but expect to understand more fully later. If this expectation is not fulfilled, then either we feel cheated or we accept that the narrative had other merits in any case. I am not sure that it is necessary to understand the convoluted intrigues of the self-described "Traitors." I remarked to Blish that I did not understand how a system based on treason could work and he replied that he did not understand it either. A further novel would have been written.

Textually, there is a contradiction between internal and external evidence. Internally, the text states:

"Neither the [faster than light] ultraphone nor the Imaginary Drive permitted the extension of human hegemony over a radius of more than ten light-years..." (ibid., p. 27)

- but explains that "...a roughly uniform interstellar economy...," in which the traitors "...act as brokers..." enforces a rule that is not widely recognized as such.

Externally, the characters in The Quincunx Of Time receive on their instantaneous Dirac transmitter a message describing the civilizations of "A Style In Treason" and addressing an audience within one of those civilizations. The Dirac transmitter is used to extend human hegemony across galaxies. Indeed, the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds had been federated two and a half millennia before the Traitors' Guild period.

However, the use of the Dirac is deliberately limited and the Traitors' Guild system is based on deception so no doubt it would have been possible to devise some way to fit these ostensibly incompatible narratives into a single timeline.

The Far Future

In the future history of James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983) and Midsummer Century, human civilization has spread over at least eleven million light years, several galaxies away, by 8873 AD, so how much further will it have spread by 25,000 AD?

Midsummer Century is set in the latter year but unfortunately, from this point of view, it imparts information only about what has been happening on Earth over twenty three millennia. This is of interest, of course. There have been several successive civilizations as well as climatic and evolutionary changes.

However, since the single datum from 8873 is that a "world-line cruiser" on a planet in another galaxy will set off to travel from that year to 8704 but will send a distress call en route, we cannot help wondering what even stranger events will happen even further away in the millennia after 8873. The characters share our interest:

" 'At headquarters on Earth, there's a whole building full of specialists who are trying to construct a coherent history of the future from the beep, and speculate their way between the gaps, but for the really far future it's a sterile task.'" (p. 109)

The character who had discovered that the almost instantaneous audiovisual beep received by Dirac communicators is the simultaneous reception of every past and future Dirac message and, further, that individual messages can easily be extracted and slowed down also realized that:

" '...the Dirac simply slides the bead of consciousness forward a certain distance from the present. Whether it's five hundred or five thousand years still remains to be seen. At that point, the law of diminishing returns sets in - or the noise factor begins to overbalance the information, take your choice - and the observer is reduced to traveling in time at the same old speed. He's just a bit ahead of himself...'" (p. 86)

Since this view was expressed in 2091, the character would certainly not have expected to understand much from extragalactic messages as late as 25,000 AD. In fact, her companions do understand one message from that year but this message is transmitted on Earth and is spoken in the universal mathematical language Machine in case any of its recipients do need a record of it. Any other message from 25,000, especially one from a remote galaxy, would be spoken in an unknown language and would describe events and situations that would be well beyond twenty first century comprehension.

Despite its Terrestrial setting, Midsummer Century fits well with the "earlier" interstellar works because it is the source of a Dirac message that significantly informs the inventor of the Dirac transmitter. All that can be said about events after 25,000 is that some of them will occur in galaxies at the edge of the expanding universe and that any Dirac messages describing such events will be incomprehensible not only linguistically but also conceptually because they will express different conflicting scientific paradigms or preconceptions (future successors of Ptolemaicism, Copernicanism, Galileanism, electromagnetic theory, Einsteinianism and Haertelism) between which it is inherently impossible to choose because the scientific method by which we try to choose is itself one of the paradigms.

A Quincunx Of Ancient Trees

The characters in "Beep" by James Blish, living in our future, receive messages from several periods of their future. While Blish was expanding "Beep" into The Quincunx Of Time, he was also writing Midsummer Century (London, 1975). Thus, these works became connected.

Midsummer Century refers to "...a quincunx of ancient trees..." (p. 48).

Further, a message transmitted as a Dirac beep circa 25,000 AD in Midsummer Century is received in the Dirac beep in 2091 AD in Quincunx. The message is sent in this form:

"...so that all receivers [past, present or future] who might have any reason to care about the problem should have a record of it." (p. 86)

The receivers include the inventor of the Dirac transmitter, Thor Wald, a major character in Quincunx, referred to early in Midsummer Century, who draws inferences about the dimensional structure of time from:

a reference in this Dirac message to the projection to 25,000 of a personality originating in 1955;

a Dirac message, in both "Beep" and Quincunx, from a world-line cruiser traveling from 8873 to 8704 along the world-line of a planet in Canes Venatici.

This diptych is a worthy successor of HG Wells' The Time Machine. Blish said that readers of Midsummer Century would probably not realize that it had been written according to an old formula: the action must start in the here and now before quickly moving to an exotic location. Its hero, John Martels, the personality temporally transmitted to 25,000, begins his adventure in 1985 in a milieu of brain-drain, Pakistani immigrants, British "public" schools, new redbrick polytechnics, a class division between the two sides of a British bar, a First in astrophysics for a man with an "atrocious" working-class accent and a new radio telescope in an American University.

Like Wells' Time Traveler, Martels:

travels thousands of years into the future;
meets evolutionarily changed human beings in a paradisal environment;
spends some time in a museum.

Also like the Time Traveler, Wald expounds the theory of time as a fourth spatial dimension.

Just as we want to know when the Time Traveler went, we also want to know more about the futures disclosed in the Dirac beep.

The Mission In Mission To The Heart Stars I

En route to the Heart Stars, a spaceship needs several scheduled stops for supplies even when it is a liner with most of its interior adapted as storage for a three man crew. An sf writer must exercise his imagination anew for each stop in such a journey.

(i) The first stop seems to be in empty space three light years beyond the red giant Antares. However, the target is a widely orbiting green companion star which happens at the time to be directly between the ship and Antares.

Sending the recognition signal by phase-velocity transmission, called "ultraphone" in other Blish works, which travels at about 125% light speed, Langer, Jack and Sandbag receive a reply within a mere two days, demonstrating that a nearby robot station, receiving their transmission, is communicating with the system of the green star by some other, much faster, means. Blish readers know of the instantaneous Dirac transmitter, which works by inter-particle action at a distance, and the instantaneous CirCon radio, which reaches around the continuum to detect radio signals currently transmitted at interstellar distances.

A voice in heavily accented English informs them that they are in a military area and must proceed directly to their next stop. That is their only contact with the first stop although even that enables Langer to deduce something about the attitudes of the entities involved.

OK, summarising the journey in appropriate detail is requiring more time than I had anticipated so this summary will have to be serialised.

The Dirac Transmitter

Wells had Cavorite;
James Blish had spindizzies.

Wells had the Time Machine;
Bob Shaw had slow glass;
Blish had the Dirac transmitter.

Wells presented each idea in just one work whereas later science fiction writers imagined future societies with multiple technological advances. Thus, the Cavorite sphere leaves Earth never to return at the end of The First Men In The Moon and the Time Machine disappears into time never to return at the end of The Time Machine but spindizzies, Dirac transmitters and anti-agathics coexist in Cities In Flight.

The Time Machine: travel to the future.
Slow glass: images from the past.
The Dirac transmitter: messages from the future.
World-line cruisers: travel backwards in time in the future! (Also in Blish.)

Blish developed the idea of the Dirac transmitter through six stages:

(i) a story co-written with Robert Lowndes;
(ii) a story submission to John Campbell;
(iii) the submission fully developed as Cities In Flight;
(iv) "Beep";
(v) "Beep" expanded as The Quincunx Of Time;
(vi) Midsummer Century, companion volume to Quincunx.

(i) In "Chaos, Co-ordinated" (1946) by James Blish and Robert Lowndes, aliens have an instantaneous communicator called the Dirac transmitter although, not having read the story, I do not understand why an alien device is named after a Terrestrial physicist.

(ii) Campbell critiqued the submission. Blish, heeding the critique, wrote the Okie series that became Cities In Flight. In the submission, the Dirac transmitter had behaved as in "Beep" (see below) but this would not have fitted with Okie culture so the transmitter reverted to being merely an instantaneous communicator (see above).

(iii) Every Dirac transmission from anywhere in the universe is instantaneously received by every Dirac device. Thus, private or secret Dirac communication is impossible.

(iv) Every Dirac transmission from any part of the four dimensional space-time continuum is received simultaneously as an almost instantaneous beep of sound and light by every Dirac device. Individual messages can be extracted and slowed down so that those who monopolise the Dirac transmitter have unique knowledge of the future. The characters, living in our future, receive several messages from different periods of their future, including one from the world-line cruiser, so, as Brian Aldiss said, this story really is about the future.

(v) In the expansion of "Beep," the characters also receive messages transmitted from societies that are the settings of two otherwise unrelated works by Blish. Thus, the reader can next read those works.

(vi) One of those works, written while "Beep" was being expanded, is Midsummer Century. In that novel, a message received thousands of years earlier in Quincunx is itself transmitted as a "beep" just in case any receiver needs to know its content.

Thus, a beep sent in Midsummer Century and received in the beep in the expansion of "Beep" is the ultimate development of the idea of the Dirac transmitter.

What The Okies Do II

The richness of James Blish's Cities In Flight is shown by the fact that not only can each of the four volumes be discussed in detail and at length but also each raises a different issue or issues:

in Volume I, McCarthyism, biology, the Jovian environment, physics and psychology;
in II, technological unemployment and education;
in III, adventure fiction and economics;
in IV, cosmology.

In Vol III, Earthman, Come Home, the Okie city of New York is legally obliged to get permission from the authorities on the colonised planet of He before mining their planet for germanium. In return, the Okies will wipe out the Hevian jungle and share the anti-agathics. Thus, if He had not been colonised or if the Okies had been willing to act illegally, then they could have mined the planet without having to give anything in return. So far, in Earthman, we have seen New York mining Utopia, offering to mine Gort and again mining He. So we come back to the questions: Why do the cities need paid work? Can they not be self-sufficient? I will try to defend the economic basis of the series.

Vol I, They Shall Have Stars, concentrates on the two discoveries, one in biology, the other in physics, that make interstellar travel possible but otherwise makes an assumption that is common to much science fiction (sf):

" 'Richardson Observatory, on the Moon, has two likely-looking systems mapped already - one at Wolf 359, the other at 61 Cygni - and there are sure to be others, hundreds of others, where Earth-like planets are highly probable.' " Cities In Flight (London, 1981), p. 123.

Highly probable that there are many planets where human beings can breathe the air and drink the water as if they had merely flown to another continent on Earth? In Blish's parallel series, The Seedling Stars, human beings must be "Adapted," by the science of pantropy, before they can colonize (many) other planets. An "ultimate" Blish novel might have been one incorporating all his divergent and convergent concepts into a single narrative:

the spindizzy and/or the Haertel overdrive;
the anti-agathics;
the Dirac transmitter, with the "beep";
pantropy;
the Arpe drive exploring the microcosm;
a single all-encompassing rationale for telepathy;
etc.

We suppose that the "Colonials" who left the Jovian system in 2021 were well equipped to survive on and to start terraforming a few extra-solar planets. Three and a half centuries later, Thorium Trust Plant no 8 uses the rediscovered spindizzy to leave the Solar System and to seek work among the colonists who have by now made a few planets fully habitable. The Plant is equipped to mine and refine thorium but not to colonize so the colonists somehow pay it to help them industrialize. The Exodus from Earth begins and germanium becomes the standard of exchange. The colonists have already settled those planets that can most accurately be described as "Earth-like." There is not a large number of uninhabited planets with mine-able oil deposits and they are not easy to find. The Okies become part of an economy in which they assist in planetary development in exchange for Oc dollars or the right to mine for what they need. The Colonials of 2021 had had both the spindizzy and the anti-agathics but somehow the latter come to be used mostly by those who need them most, the Okies.

I will continue to reread the series noting what is said about contracts between cities and planets. Amalfi from New York compares notes with an Okie from another city. New Yorkers are mainly miners and petroleum geologists but have developed sidelines. The other city were agronomists working on the periphery, "'...teaching abandoned colonies...how to work poisoned soil and manage low-yield crops without heavy machinery...,'" with a sideline in soil-source antibiotics (p. 313). They " '...converted to a barter economy as soon as we got out of the last commerce lanes.' " (p. 313)

Barter must also have preceded the germanium standard.