A Torrent of Faces

Blish collaborated with Norman L. Knight on a series of stories set in a world with a population a thousand times that of today, and followed the efforts of those keeping the system running, collected in one volume as A Torrent of Faces.

Included in this collection is Blish's Nebula-nominated novella 'The Shipwrecked Hotel'—a story about a semi-submerged hotel with approximately a million guests which experiences a massive computer failure (a result of escaped silverfish) and begins to sink. Running parallel to all the side-plots is the inevitable catastrophe of the mile-wide asteroid 'Flavia' striking near the east coast of the USA. The stories are also notable for including a form of pantropy that has been used to modify humans into a sea-dwelling form known as 'Tritons'.