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James Benjamin Blish was born on May 23, 1921, in East Orange, New Jersey, the only child of Asa Rhodes Blish and Dorothea Schneewind Blish. Blish's parents divorced in 1927 and his mother took him to Chicago; there Blish cultivated a youthful interest in chemistry and music, which in 1931 was augmented by an interest in science fiction triggered by his reading of Astounding Stories. In 1934 Blish and his mother returned to East Orange, and he graduated from East Orange High School in 1938. By this time he had discovered the world of science fiction fandom: he engaged in a brief correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft, issued a short-lived fanzine entitled The Planeteer, and contributed to Tesseract, the journal of the Science Fiction Advancement Association. |
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In September 1938 Blish attended the first meeting of the Futurian Society of New York, along with Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, and others who would later become prominent in science fiction. The next year he began studies at Rutgers University, from which he received a B.Sc. in Education in 1942. Blish's first professionally published work was a story in Super Science Stories (edited by Pohl) in 1940, and he published several other stories before being drafted in the U.S. army in 1942. Blish, disliking military discipline, remained a private during his two years in the army, although his scientific training allowed him to become a laboratory medical technician. Blish then attended graduate school at Columbia for two years, but failed to receive a degree. In 1947 he married Virginia Kidd, with whom he had three children (one died in infancy). In the early 1950s he moved his family out of Manhattan to the small town of Milford, Pennsylvania. |
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While editing various trade journals in the drug and food industries, Blish published voluminously in the science fiction pulps, including such celebrated stories as "Surface Tension" (1952) and "A Case of Conscience" (1953; later to be expanded into a novel). After publishing several minor novels, Blish wrote the first novel in the "Cities in Flight'' tetralogy, Earthman, Come Home (1955), which was followed by They Shall Have Stars |
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