A fan of scifi during the 1930ΓÇÖs, James Blish published his first short story, ΓÇ£Emergency RefuelingΓÇ¥ in 1940 at the age of 19. A member of the Futurians, a New York fan group, Blish completed his microbiology studies at Rutgers in 1942, and served as a medical lab technician in the Army during World War II. Following the war. Blish continued his academic studies in zoology at Columbia before turning his full attentions to writing.
Three of his early works were written under the pen names of Donald Laverty, John MacDougal and Arthur Merlyn. Blish broke through with the first of his Okie stories ­ stories set in flying cities that were powered by antigravity machines called ‘spindizzies’ ­ which appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction in 1950. Underlying the melodrama of the Okie books is a somber attitude toward the repetitive cycle of history ­ a view derived from Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Other notable works in the Eisenhower era include “Beanstalk” (1952), “Common Time” (1953), “Beep” (1954) and “A Work of Art” (1956). A Case of Conscience, Blish’s serious treatment of of priest in a planet inhabited by beings seemingly free of the concept of Original Sin, won the 1959 Hugo ‘Best Novel’ award.
Not surprisingly, his background in biology led Blish to incorporate biological themes which had often be neglected in scifi works into his writings. The Seeding Stars (1952-56) sets the course for the early development of genetic engineering in science fiction.
Recognizable to the general public and trekkers as the author of Spock Must Die (1970), Blish spent his later years writing books based on the original scripts of the Star Trek television series ­ publishing a total of 12 collections and several readers from 1967 to 1981.
In addition to his science fiction works, Blish also published more academic writings on Spengler , Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Blish died in 1975 after a bout with lung cancer. He emigrated to England in 1969 to be close to the scholarly environs of Oxford, where he is buried. His manuscripts and papers are housed at OxfordΓÇÖs Bodleian Library.
