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to the teenage coming-to-maturity novel that Heinlein wrote so masterfully, and the paucity of result from the efforts of forcing his talents against the grain. |
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The publication of Black Easter in 1968 inaugurated the final period of Blish's career, when he began producing gnomic and highly dense novellas at the rate of about one slim volume a year until the onset of his final illness. These last works have received nothing like the acclaim greeting Blish's output of the late Fifties, and most are now out of print in the United States. That readers who continue to find pleasure in The Seedling Stars and Cities in Flight have not welcomed The Day After Judgment or Anywhen suggests less a waning of Blish's powers in his last years than the likelihood that readers have responded to the genre exuberance and vestigial pulp elements still present in these middle works, which are not to be found in the uncompromising, distilled stories that followed. The Seedling Stars remains, among other things, an enjoyable and suspenseful adventure story, which can hardly be said for the relentless intellectualism and muted external action that make up these final works. (. . .) |
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If these late works are too extreme in their rareficationor their attributes are too fitted to their specific strategiesto have had much influence upon the science fiction of its time, The Seedling Stars was not. Accessible in its modulation between overt intellectual optimism and covert Stoicism, provocative in its displacing of our culture's heroic (male) self-images into situations altered in frame of reference, and pleasing in the intelligence with which the individual stories are told, The Seedling Stars served with A Case of Conscience and Blish's successful short fiction of the Fifties as a model of the first several steps science fiction must take in becoming an adult fiction that aspires to artistry. So Blish was more influential in the virtuosity of his discovery of his own voice than in his period of true maturity, as Heinlein had made his own enormous impact upon modern science fiction in the early Forties yet began producing his best work a decade later. For a field that is only a few steps closer to true maturity than the milestone Blish left in The Seedling Stars, not necessarily farther than Blish himself finally got, this salutary point on the accessibility of influence remains valuable, and yet to be appreciated. The same can be said for much of the work of James Blish. |
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Gregory Feeley, "Cages of Conscience from Seedling Stories: The Development of Blish's Novels," Foundation No. 24 (February 1982): 6667 |
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