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ment, he found a way of avoiding, surmounting, and transforming the controlling clichés of SF. Taking Roger Bacon and Spengler as his models, Blish saw to it that science fiction itself participatedat least provisionallyin the process of conceptual breakthrough. At such moments of breakthrough, one becomes aware of the fantasy of reality and the reality of fantasy. And that is the enigma that characterizes science fiction, the tortured mise en abîme to which so much of Blish's work testifies.
David Ketterer, Imprisoned in a Tesseract: The Life and Work of James Blish (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), pp. 31314, 319
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Gary K. Wolfe
At the time of Blish's death in 1975 (according to Cy Chauvin in his preface to The Tale That Wags the God), he had planned on completing two additional volumes: one on SF scholarship, the other on critical reactions to various modern art-forms (including music, fantasy, and SF). The former volume, alas, never made it to the revision stage, and none of it survives except in the Blish papers at Oxford. (It would have been particularly enlightening to see first-hand what Blish had to say about Moskowitz, Suvin, Merril, et al., particularly given his habit of uncompromising directness.) The second volume, which seems to have been conceived in much the same spirit as Tom Wolfe's various attacks on contemporary art-forms and critical credulity, does survive in part in this volumein essays on James Branch Cabell, SF, and modern music. Chauvin has rounded out the volume with seven other essays, an interview between Blish and Brian Aldiss, and a useful and thorough bibliography by Judith Blish.
Blish's earlier volumes with Advent led to his deserved reputation as the field's premier "technical" critic, commenting on everything from punctuation to verb usage to narrative structure. Many of his insights, dressed up in proper academic garb, could pass for modern deconstructionist criticism. While Blish's concern with matters of form and technique is still much in evidence, The Tale That Wags the God is generally much broader in scope and more ruminative than the Issues at Hand volumes. It is as comprehensive an overview as we are likely to get of Blish the essayist and lecturer, the erstwhile musicologist and scholar of Joyce and Cabell.
The first five essays in this volume cover various aspects of modern SF and its tribulations, and some of them seem a bit old hat by now. "The

 
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