James Blish


James Benjamin Blish was born in New Jersey on May 23, 1921, and died on July 30, 1975, at his home in England. He wrote his first science fiction story at the age of nine, a document executed in careful pencil and now residing in the Blish Collection archive of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, along with his first editions, manuscripts and other documents.

After his graduation from the University of Rutgers in biology, he served in the United States Army as a lab technician (and informally as German translator for POWs) and then went back to graduate school. Deciding that since he was already selling stories to the science fiction magazines of the time, he thought he'd do better as a writer than as a scientist. He devoted himself to science fiction as a career—although he continued for many years at his day job writing reports and articles on scientific subject for various corporations.

He published 20 novels and well over 150 short stories. Some early ones appeared in Western and Sports markets as well as science fiction, and his work was represented in the magazines Astounding, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Galaxy, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Stirring Science Stories. and others still known—or long forgotten—as well as Crack Detective Stories and The Complete Cowboy.

In the late 1960s he was invited to "novelize" the scripts from the original Star Trek series, which was the beginning of the flood of Trekbooks that never ends. One of the series was an original novel called Spock Must Die.

He also originated serious SF criticism, in a series of articles later collected as The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand, and The Tale That Wags the God, published by Advent Publishers, and many other articles on both pro and fan magazines. He contributed to the James Joyce Quarterly and Kalki, the journal of the James Branch Cabell Society. A substantial number of his poems were published in literary magazines and were finally collected under the title With All of Love, published in 1995 by Anamnesis Press.

In 1959 he won the Hugo Award for his novel A Case of Conscience, a part of a loose tetralogy called "After Such Knowledge" which includes Doctor Mirabilis, a biography of the medieval scientist Roger Bacon, and the connected novels Black Easter and The Day after Judgment. The Seedling Stars was a series of stories about the adaptation of man to live in exotic environments and includes what may be his best known short story, "Surface Tension." He was a founding member of The Science Fiction Writers of America.

Critic Damon Knight has pointed out that all his work deals with the theme of "breaking through" into something new, whether physical or mental, a kind of metaphor of birth. Cities in Flight, a series of four related novels, describes the effects of autonomy and self-containment on the people of a large city torn up by its roots as it encounters the greater universe, and beyond. The novels are regarded as classics in the field since their first publication in the 1950s.

He understood and loved classical music—Bach, Mozart, Mahler, Richard Strauss—and Duke Ellington. He was very partial to cats, enjoyed an occasional dabble in amateur theatre, but his main preoccupation was always the world of books.

Judith Blish
Awards
Hugo Best Novel winner (1959) : A Case of Conscience
Nebula Best Novellette nominee (1965) : The Shipwrecked Hotel
Nebula Best Novel nominee (1968) : Black Easter: Or Faust Aleph-Null
Hugo Best Novella nominee (1970) : We All Die Naked
Collections
They Shall Have Stars (1957)
Star Trek 1 (1967)
Star Trek 2 (1968)
Star Trek 3 (1969)
Cities in Flight (1970)
Star Trek 4 (1971)
Star Trek 5 (1972)
Star Trek 6 (1972)
Star Trek 7 (1972)
Star Trek 8 (1972)
Best Science Fiction Stories (1973)
Star Trek 9 (1973)
Star Trek 10 (1974)
Star Trek 11 (1975)
Star Trek 12 (1977)
After Such Knowledge (1991)
With All of Love: Selected Poems (1995)
Novels
Jack of Eagles (1952)
The Duplicated Man (1953) (with Robert A W Lowndes)
The Warriors of Day (1953)
Earthman, Come Home (1956)
The Frozen Year (1957)
The Seedling Stars (1957)
Year 2018! (1957)
ESPer (1958)
VOR (1958) (with Damon Knight)
Galactic Cluster (1959)
So Close to Home (1961)
The Star Dwellers (1961)
Titan's Daughter (1961)
The Night Shapes (1962)
Life for the Stars (1964)
Mission to the Heart Stars (1965)
A Torrent of Faces (1967) (with Norman L Knight)
Welcome to Mars! (1967)
Giants in the Earth (1968)
The Vanished Jet (1968)
...And All the Stars a Stage (1971)
Anywhen (1971)
Midsummer Century (1972)
A Clash of Cymbals (1973)
The Quincunx of Time (1973)
Fallen Star (1977)
The Testament of Andros (1977)
Get Out of My Sky (1980)
Tale That Wags the God (1987)
A Work of Art (1993)
Dusk of Idols (1996)
Series
After Such Knowledge
A Case of Conscience (1958)
Doctor Mirabilis (1964)
Black Easter: Or Faust Aleph-Null (1968)
The Day After Judgement (1970)
The Devil's Day (1985)

Star Trek
Spock Must Die (1970)
Short Stories
Solar Plexus (1941)
There Shall Be No Darkness (1950)
Bridge (1952)
Surface Tension (1952)
A Case of Conscience (1953)
Common Time (1953)
Earthman, Come Home (1953)
At Death's End (1954)
Beep (1954)
Get Out of My Sky (1956)
A Work of Art (1956)
The Masks (1959)
In Tomorrow's Little Black Bag (1961)
Who's in Charge Here? (1962)
No Jokes on Mars (1965)
The Shipwrecked Hotel (1965) (with Norman L Knight)
A Hero's Life (1966)
How Beautiful with Banners (1966)
Balance of Terror (1967)
Charlie's Law (1967)
The Conscience of the King (1967)
Dagger of the Mind (1967)
Miri (1967)
The Naked Time (1967)
The Unreal McCoy (1967)
Arena (1968)
The City on the Edge of Forever (1968)
Court Martial (1968)
Errand of Mercy (1968)
Operation-Annihilate (1968)
Skysign (1968)
Space Seed (1968)
A Taste of Armageddon (1968)
Tomorrow is Yesterday (1968)
Amok Time (1969)
Assignment: Earth (1969)
The Doomsday Machine (1969)
Friday's Child (1969)
The Last Gunfight (1969)
Mirror, Mirror (1969)
The Trouble with Tribbles (1969)
More Light (1970)
We All Die Naked (1970)
All Our Yesterdays (1971)
The Devil in the Dark (1971)
The Enterprise Incident (1971)
Journey to Babel (1971)
The Menagerie (1971)
A Piece of the Action (1971)
The Apple (1972)
By Any Other Name (1972)
Catspaw (1972)
The Changeling (1972)
The Cloud Minders (1972)
The Deadly Years (1972)
Elaan of Troyius (1972)
The Enemy Within (1972)
For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky (1972)
Getting Along (1972)
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (1972)
The Lights of Zetar (1972)
The Mark of Gideon (1972)
Metamorphosis (1972)
The Paradise Syndrome (1972)
Requiem for Methuselah (1972)
The Savage Curtain (1972)
Spock's Brain (1972)
This Side of Paradise (1972)
The Tholian Web (1972)
Turnabout Intruder (1972)
The Way to Eden (1972)
Where No Man Has Gone Before (1972)
Who Mourns for Adonais? (1972)
Whom Gods Destroy (1972)
Wolf in the Fold (1972)
The Immunity Syndrome (1973)
Obsession (1973)
The Return of the Archons (1973)
Return to Tomorrow (1973)
That Which Survives (1973)
The Ultimate Computer (1973)
The Alternative Factor (1974)
The Empath (1974)
The Galileo Seven (1974)
The Glitch (1974) (with L Jerome Stanton)
Is There in Truth No Beauty? (1974)
The Omega Glory (1974)
A Private Little War (1974)
Bread and Circuses (1975)
Day of the Dove (1975)
Plato's Stepchildren (1975)
The Squire of Gothos (1975)
What Are Little Girls Made Of? (1975)
Wink of an Eye (1975)
And the Children Shall Lead (1977)
The Corbomite Maneuver (1977)
The Gamesters of Triskelion (1977)
Patterns of Force (1977)
Shore Leave (1977)
A Matter of Energy
Testament of Andros
Turn of a Century