Here's a link to a Wikipedia entry about the author and this particular series of novels; I checked a couple other places and this is about the best overall short summary I could find.
And wow, I wasn't aware Blish had passed away so long ago-- back in 1975, at the age of 54. (Acck! That's my age!)
Interesting idea anyway-- instead of the conventional spaceship(s) to the stars everybody else was writing about, Blish got the idea to place a immense force field bubble around entire Terran cities-- city, air, ground and all-- and then using an anti-gravity device literally take the city on spacefaring voyages.
So, the reason Lost sent me thinking this direction was the idea that the island was brought here by an alien civilization that actually executed this concept. The "magnetic field" could be a residual or ultra low power version of the spacefaring field.
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Date: 2008-06-10 03:28 am (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Blish#Cities_in_Flight_2
And wow, I wasn't aware Blish had passed away so long ago-- back in 1975, at the age of 54. (Acck! That's my age!)
Interesting idea anyway-- instead of the conventional spaceship(s) to the stars everybody else was writing about, Blish got the idea to place a immense force field bubble around entire Terran cities-- city, air, ground and all-- and then using an anti-gravity device literally take the city on spacefaring voyages.
So, the reason Lost sent me thinking this direction was the idea that the island was brought here by an alien civilization that actually executed this concept. The "magnetic field" could be a residual or ultra low power version of the spacefaring field.