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of a seeding program, Blish fills his prose with allusions to contemporary human culture that seem jarring in the alien contexts he has created. These allusions constantly make readers aware of their own alienation from the characters of the stories, and of the literary culture that the pantropes have abandoned: "privations of which Jack London might have made a whole novel"; "a classic example . . . of the literary device called 'the pathetic fallacy' "; "whole chapters, whole cantos, whole acts of what might have been conscious heroism . .. were thrown away"; "the old magazine clipping . . . was as yellow as paella''; "he had never heard of Kant and the Categorical Imperative"; and so on. It is possible that Blish is trying to give some intellectual legitimacy to stories which, when first published, were part of a genre widely regarded as pulpish and subliterate; but it is also possible that the allusions represent an intelligent author grappling with the problem of describing alien states and being in a style which, because of the nominal realism demanded by the traditions of science fiction, is limited to the familiar. |
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Gary K. Wolfe, The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1979), pp. 208, 21011, 214 |
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Blish's sustained burst of creativity between 1957 and 1962, when he called in the debts of all the stories he had begun and never relinquished and exerted his major influence on science fiction, produced 11 novels, two collections and a volume of criticism. In a sense Blish was using the capital he had accumulated in the ten years following his return to science fiction after World War II, for he was never to produce work at that rate again, and even those works produced during the latter half of this period show a change in tonea diminishing of the density and energy informing those works of the late fiftiesand are not so highly regarded today. Blish's major efforts of the early and middle 1960s are Doctor Mirabilis (1964), a brilliant historical novel often regarded as his finest work, and A Torrent of Faces (with Norman L. Knight, 1967): the author's longest and most exhaustively thought-out books. During this period Blish published five brief and unimpressive juvenile novels, of which A Life for the Stars is probably the best. One assumes that Blish's major attentions were directed to his researches and labors on the longer works; but a look at The Star Dwellers (1961) shows how little Blish's temperament and talents were fitted |
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