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Blish himself, using the William Atheling, Jr. persona, wrote one plausible conclusion to any account of his own work. From his hospital bed just before his death, he put the finishing touches on a dense, synoptic article with the Joycean title "Probapossible Prolegomena to Ideareal History." In this last essay he makes use of the Spenglerian "ideareal" (i.e., Platonic) notion of historical cycles that had earlier structured his Cities in Flight tetralogy to formulate a theory of the nature and historical place of SF. What has, to my knowledge, nowhere been observed is the way in which this essay ties in with, and provides a gloss on, what Blish is doing in Black . . . Judgment (Black Easter and The Day After Judgment). In the light of "Probapossible Prolegomena" it is apparent that Black . . . Judgment is to some extent a fantasy about the nature and place of science fiction, and the relationship between science fiction and fantasy. The essay and the diptych provide a culmination to the development of Blish's theoretical ideas about science fiction. An emphasis on operating (by way of extrapolation) within the parameters of science in the 1951 ''Science in Science Fiction" series of articles gives way to the Kuhnian concept of breaking paradigms in "The Science in Science Fiction" article of 1971. But only in the Atheling piece, published in 1978, does Blish fully confront the fact that at best science fiction can do no more than offer the illusion of breaking paradigms and thus the inevitable element of fantasy. (. . .) |
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Blish's career as an SF writer constitutes an opening of the field, an opening composed of gaps. Cy Chauvin speaks to this when he writes that Blish |
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bridged many of the gaps in sf between writers in America and England . . . between the new generation of writers and the old . . . between routine commercial fiction and that which attempted to be literature . . . and, of course, between writers and critics. I know of no one else in science fiction who was a bridge between so many. |
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Not only, it should be added, does Blish's corpus encompass the New Wave; it also anticipates the current engulfment of SF by fantasy. What finally needs to be emphasized, then, is the bridge that Blish devised between SF and fantasy in terms of the relationship between physics and metaphysics. By putting demonology up against science and reversing the normal SF balance between the scientific and the "transcendental" in Black . . . Judg- |
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