Centuries before, the voracious cities had exhausted Earth's resources. Then propelled by the immensely powerful gravity-neutralizing spin dizzy machines made possible by the Blackett-Dirac hypothesis, they had, one by one, hurtled off into the depths of space. Wandering from galaxy to galaxy, exploiting the underdeveloped planets, they searched ever for fresh supplies of the anti-agathic drugs which had conquered death itself and prolonged the human life span to thousands of years. Behind, they left Earth almost deserted, a garden planet bearing only one city worth noticing, the sleepy capital of a universe.
And though the Earth police ruled the galaxies, many were the corners of the universe where Earth was known only as a legend, a green myth floating unknown thousands of parsecs away in space. And many were the cities which had reverted to the ancient law of Earth's jungles – recognizing no rule but force, seizing what they needed by the strength of their arms. So it was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later the outlaw cities would band together in a march on Earth to attempt to remove the one threat to their hegemony.
Now that day had come. Led by Buda-Pesht the cities were organizing. And in their way stood only two men, John Amalfi and Mark Hazleton, and an aging, far from warlike city thrust into an unaccustomed light as the only possible savior of the universe.
How these two men and the city they led rose to the emergency and finally paved the way for their old and honored metropolis to return to its heritage and home forms the body of this extraordinarily inventive and imaginative science-fiction novel.
Although published as a novel, the book actually consists of four loosely-connected novellas:
James Benjamin Blish (1921–1975) was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. He also wrote literary criticism of science fiction using the pen name William Atheling Jr. Picture: Gravestone of James Blish, Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, England.
