by James Blish
In 2522 the Bureaucratic State collapses, the new Earth government proclaims a general amnesty, and the "Empty Years" begin; the Earthmanist Culture is thus free to develop in its own way. Admiral Hrunta is poisoned in 3089, and his death is followed by the "rapid Balkanization of the Hruntan Empire, which was never even at its best highly, cohesive" [ALFTS, 171]; in 3111 Arpad Hrunta is installed as "Emperor of Space." Here we seem to have the Interregnum which, according to Spengler, occurs in every culture and "forms the boundary between the feudal union and the class state" [II, 375]. Since Hruntanism is a religion as well as a dynastic principle, and since periods of religious reformation coincide with the transition from feudalism to the aristocratic state [II, 386], we are perhaps justified hi listing Arpad Hrunta in our table as a religious reformer.
In an aristocratic state the king's authority depends for its existence on the power of one or another of the aristocratic factions. The "absolute" state emerges when the king allies himself with the bourgeoisie and thus finds strength enough to suppress aristocratic disorder. In Earthmanist society as a whole, Earth is king, the various empires, duchies, and republics are the aristocracy, and the Okie cities are the bourgeoisie. Here the development into absolutism seems to culminate in 3602 with the "reduction" of the Duchy of Gort, the death of Arpad
Hrunta, and the "dissolution of the Empire," all brought about by the "recruescent Earth police" [TTOT, 470], for we now have a galactic society in which the Earth police keep the spacelanes clear for Okie commerce [ECH, 398399]. Since the Duchy of Gort represents an extreme form of Hruntanism and since puritanism is a concomitant of the effort to preserve the aristocratic state [Spengler, II, 386n, 424], we can perhaps list the Duchy as an instance of puritanism.
When aristocratic factionalism has been suppressed, the king and the aristocracy become allies against the rising power of the bourgeoisie, who soon become ripe for revolution; as do the Okies after the "collapse of the germanium standard" in 3900. The gathering of the mayors aboard Buda-Pesht [ECH, 370381] and the March on Earth that follows, even though it results in apparent defeat in the Battle of Earth} can be regarded as the 1789, and the passage of the anti-Okie bill in 3976 as the 1815, of Earthman history.
At this point, so far as the galaxy proper is concerned, the story of the Earthmanist Culture comes to a sudden end, for the Earthman domains are invaded and conquered by a nonhuman "culture," the Web of Hercules [TTOT, 471]. Since this is so, we are unable to test our evaluation of the 39003976 period against later events. Even so, and even though Mayor Amalfi, the principal hero and leading cultural morphologist of CITIES IN FLIGHT, believes that the Okies have been completely defeated [ECH, 421422], I can see no reason to believe that the restoration of the Ancient Regime in 3976 would have been any more permanent than it was in 1815. 4. The Triumph of Time over Space
Following the Battle of Earth, New York moves from the galaxy proper to the Greater Magellanic Cloud. The military and political events that ensue upon its arrival there are perhaps, and the philosophy of Stochasticism is certainly, consistent with the beginning of the Period of Contending States. Here the beginning is all that we can know anything about, for once again history is cut short
After this point, cleaning up the inconsistencies in the chronology involved advancing all the dates, and so I have altered Dr. Mullen's subsequent dates which followed the original Chronology to reflect the changes. J. B. this time by the "totally universal physical cataclysm" of the year 4104 [TTOT, 471].
The fourth volume of CITIES IN FLIGHT in its U.S. edition bears the title The Triumph of Time. Since the principal theme here is not especially Spenglerian, my purpose is simply to note that this title, and indeed the story itself, could have been inspired, whether or not it was, by a passage on Spengler's final page:
Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man, a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light world of our eyes. [II, 507]
Footnotes
1. The volume page references in this essay are to the translation of Spengler by Charles Francis Atkinson (two volumes: New York: Knopf, 1926, 1928). Spengler completed this work in late 1922.
2. The Issue at Hand (Chicago: Advent, 1964), p. 60n.
3. Spengler uses the phrases "centralized bureaucracy state" in connection with the Egyptian third political epoch [1, Table iiij. but I hardly think that Blish's Bureaucratic State is intended to be an aristocratic state.
4. This table is based primarily on the three tables that appear at the end of Spengler's first volume: "Cultural Epochs" and "Political Epochs" (organized as in this table) and "Spiritual Epochs" (organized as spring, summer, autumn, winter). Making the table turned out to be very difficult for me, partly because of the necessity for squaring the two organizations, partly because Spengler does not tabulate the political epochs for the Arabian Culture, partly because the dates in the three tables, are not wholly consistent with each other or with those in the text, which is not wholly self consistent, but primarily because of the need to select and interpret in such a way that a much abbreviated amalgamation would make sense to me, and hopefully to the reader. .
RDM
Table of Contents
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE: New Earth
CHAPTER TWO: Nova Magellanis
CHAPTER THREE: The Nursery of Time
CHAPTER FOUR: Fabr-Suithe
CHAPTER FIVE: Jehad
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Meta-galactic Center
AFTERWORD: THE EARTHMANIST CULTURE: CITIES IN FLIGHT as a Spenglerian History
1. Blish's Twenty-First Century: The Coming of Caesarism
2. Blish's Twenty-First Century: Two Cultures or One?