A space-traveling Jesuit priest confronts a moral but godless alien race in this Hugo Award–winning novel by the author of the Cities in Flight saga.Father Ruiz-Sanchez is a dedicated man, a Jesuit priest who is also a scientist, and a scientist who is also a human being. He doesn't feel any genuine conflicts in his belief system—until he is sent to Lithia.The reptilian inhabitants of this distant world appear to be admirable in every way. Untroubled by gree...

Theron Ware is a renowned scholar and Doctor of Divinity. He is also secretly one of the world's great Black magicians. And when a rich megalomaniac industrialist, Baines, enlists his aid in summoning a demon from Hell to assassinate the governor of California (in an "excess of horror"), Ware has no scruples about accepting the assignment. But this terrible and devilish deed is only a warm-up, a test from Baines to see whether Ware can help him to accomplish his ultimate purpose: opening t...

The powerful black magician Theron Ware has opened the gates of Hell and unleashed an army of demons. Chaos and destruction prevail, and most of the world lies smouldering in ruins. But in a bunker beneath the ashes of Denver a small group of survivors are determined not to submit to the forces of evil. They summon the nuclear powers of the country's military arsenal to destroy Hell, but what can men do against the almighty evil that is Satan himself?A direct sequel to Hugo Award w...

This is a posthumous collection of Blish essays, mostly on science fiction and fantasy. These include studies of Poul Anderson, James Branch Cabell, and the application of Spengler to science fiction. Other pieces range from "Music of the Absurd" (modern music—more fantastic than any fiction ) to the autobiographical "A Science Fiction Coming of Age" (focused on Blish's childhood), and a conversation with Brian Aldiss that reveals the emotion behind Blish the man and his fiction, as well a...

A madman can be prevented from throwing on bomb on Earth—but what if he's in space? Introduction by John Betancourt.

James Blish, in his incarnation as "William Atheling, Jr.," has written more than his share of the most incisive criticism of contemporary science fiction. In 1964 Advent brought out The Issue at Hand, a collection of Atheling's critical essays on stories in the science-fiction magazines.Now we present a new volume which concentrates on science-fiction books. As before, Atheling's rapier skewers literary malefactors of many kinds, including some well-known authors whose great popul...

For many years, hiding under a cloak of anonymity, the most penetrating critic of the field of magazine science fiction was known as "William Atheling, Jr." It soon became a challenge to guess his real identity. And that was no easy game, for Atheling's dissection did not spare even his other ego, the noted science-fiction writer James Blish.Having shed his protective covering, Mr. Blish has assembled many of the Atheling papers and edited them into the present book. While it cover...

High above Earth, Colonel Hal Gascoigne commands Satellite Vehicle One, a one-man orbital station carrying catastrophic authority. When voices begin speaking to him—voices that should not exist—Gascoigne is confronted with orders that defy logic, protocol, and sanity itself. The isolation of space becomes a pressure chamber as fragments of routine turn unreliable and the line between perception and reality erodes.James Blish constructs a tense psychological standoff where the great...

Something has been dropped into New York Harbor, and no one can identify it in time. The instruments stall, the divers see nothing but mud, and every reliable method begins to slip as the deadline closes in. The pressure builds not because of what is known, but because no one can prove what it isn’t. With the city hanging in the balance, the question becomes how far you’re willing to go when certainty refuses to appear.As the clock ticks down, the problem shifts from analysis to de...

Pete Kagen, a brilliant but imagination-starved troubleshooter, arrives on the Moon to find out why Earth’s costly rocketships are disappearing without a trace. He expects corruption, mismanagement, or military blunders—but instead encounters an eerie second sun in the sky, a mysterious homesteader growing impossible “crops,” and a lunar landscape hiding secrets far beyond human engineering. As Kagen digs deeper, his skepticism is tested by strange accidents, unexplained failures, and a ma...

One-Shot by James Blish.

(Excerpt): "You can do a great deal if you have enough data, and enough time to compute on it, by logical methods. But given the situation that neither data nor time is adequate, and an answer must be produced ... what do you do?."