James Blish (1921–1975) was a US writer of science fiction and fantasy, sometimes with religious themes, who studied biology in college. Blish also published a substantial body of nonfiction and was one of the prominent science fiction critics of the 1950s in particular. His early fiction appeared in Super Science Stories in 1940, and after World War II he eventually earned enough from his stories and novels to become a full-time writer. Blish achieved significant success for his “Okies” stories (collected in the Cities in Flight series, 1950–62) and made a minor claim to astronomic fame by creating the term “gas giant” for his story “Solar Plexus” (Beyond Human Ken, a 1952 anthology edited by Judith Merril).
If this were the extent of Blish’s involvement in science fiction, he would remain a well-regarded figure in the field. But he also pushed well beyond “center genre” with novels like A Case of Conscience—and the infernal Black Easter and The Day After Judgment, inspired by the work of the poet T. S. Eliot and John Milton, a famous apocalyptic English poet from the 1600s who used supernatural imagery.
In this context, it is ironic that major figures in the New Wave movement of the 1960s, such as M. John Harrison, attacked Blish as a member of the old guard. With the advantage of time and distance, this seems in part to be a misunderstanding. Blish studied literature at Columbia and had a certain amount of disdain for pulp fiction and shoddy editing. In addition, Blish’s most avant-garde work features conflicted, nuanced characters and situations, and has more in common with New Wave fiction than with traditional “sense of wonder” pulp adventure tales. He was enough of a “man of letters” to have been a useful and formidable advocate for new ways of approaching science fiction—but also exactly what the counterculture New Wave–ists saw as the enemy. Ironically, in the 1940s, Blish had been part of a group that founded a new amateur press association that, as Robert A. W. Lowndes puts it in his introduction to The Best of James Blish (1979), wanted to “write intelligently about something other than the latest contents of Astounding or nostalgia for the ‘good old days,’ ‘sense of wonder,’ fan reminiscences.”
Blish achieved even more fame for his “pantropy” stories, the term coined to describe the concept of human genetic modification for the purpose of survival outside of the planet Earth. Clifford D. Simak’s story “Desertion” (also included in this anthology) is considered the earliest story to use this concept, predating Blish’s work.
In the pantropy stories, collected in The Seedling Stars (1957)—admittedly more traditional than Blish’s edgier work—human modification is deemed easier and less intrusive than terraforming for colonizing other worlds. “Surface Tension” (1952) is the third (and most popular) story in the pantropy series—a sprawling, exciting, and complex tale that seems even more relevant today, in the context of human life on our own planet. “Surface Tension” was selected by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1970 as one of the best stories published before the Nebula Awards were created. It was also reprinted in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One: 1929–1964.