The Hollywood Movie Machine seems to be determined to remake, re-imagine or adapt every book, computer game, novel, short story, play or song ever made. We’ve got the highly anticipated Watchmen movie due out soon, a heretical remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still and even a Far Cry movie from Uwe Boll with a mainly German principle cast.
I find it strange however that nobody has yet tried to adapt the four novels written by James Blish’s that make up the Cities in Flight series. They seem more than perfect for the big screen treatment, particularly the middle two books: A Life for the Stars and Earthman Come Home. The premise of the novels actually begs for a big screen adaptation, especially in the current climate where spectacle seems to be far more important than substance or even plot.
The four books primarily revolve around the city of New York, or more accurately Manhattan Island, which has left behind a polluted and increasingly authoritarian Earth and is wandering through the galaxy in search of work. This bizarre situation is made possible by the use of a MacGuffin called a spindizzy which through the magic of science creates an anti-gravity field around an object. The limitation of the device is that the efficiency and power of the device is inversely proportional to the mass lifted. Therefore it’s far more efficient to lift a city than to move a conventional spaceship. The cities themselves form a vast spacefaring culture where they trade their skills and advanced technology to various colonies and alien empires in return for supplies, food and raw materials. They refer to themselves as Okies in reference to the historical Okies who left the American Midwest during the 1930′s due to a combined effect of economic depression and the infamous Dust Bowl.
The first book They Shall Have Stars describes the development of the spindizzy and its associated effects on Earth. The western governments become more and more paranoid over the potential of the spindizzy and eventually execute the protagonist as a political threat after he reveals the science and existence of the spindizzy to the world. It’s interesting, but essentially a political thriller with a hint of espionage.
In the second book A life for the stars a young farm boy living near Scranton, Pennsylvania is accidentally caught up in the departure of the former mining city as it leaves for the stars. He survives several desperate and ill managed disasters before being traded along with many other undesirables to the much larger and successful New York.
The third novel follows the adventure of the boy and the city of New York itself as it travels amongst the stars in search of work. Eventually they reencounter the city of Scranton which has devolved into what the Okies call a Bindlestiff: a tramp city that survives by criminal activities rather than honest work. At the climax of the book the residents of New York install spindizzies on a planet in an effort to escape an increasingly hostile Earth based empire. The planet itself is thrown out of the Milky Way towards the Large Magellanic Cloud where it ultimately comes to rest.
The final book A Clash of Cymbals seems to run off at a tangent to the rest of the series. The New Yorkers discover that the universe is coming to an end imminently and they race to be at the epicentre of the collapse before another group in the belief that whoever is present at the exact time and space the universe ends will be able to shape the destiny of the next universe after a big bang. Weird is the only way to describe it.
I think a combination of the two middle books would work best. Have the protagonist wander aboard a city just as it departs for the stars and document his adventures aboard as he struggles against a tyrannical mayor. It’s a simple story with plenty of room for amazing visuals effects: it is a flying city after all. Hopefully a decent screenwriter, director and producer will take up the challenge and create a Sci-Fi masterwork that we can all enjoy, but I’ve got the feeling that if, or when it does come a film version will be a steaming pile of crap.
I can dream though.
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