Although some of the contradictions [in Blish's Cities in Flight tetralogy] surely result from authorial carelessness, forgetfulness, or indifference, they are too numerous and too prominent to be regarded as anything other than an essential feature of the overall story. Since point of view is rigidly controlled throughout the work, every statement can be attributed to one or another of the various characters. Given this fact, we can make sense of the tetralogy by regarding it, not as a fiction in which a universe has been created by an omniscient, omnipotent author, but as historical narrative with a large admixture of myth; that is, by assuming that behind the sometimes accurate, sometimes erroneous, sometimes mythical narrative there is an actual history….

[The] explicit Spenglerianism of Cities in Flight is erroneous in one of its details, highly dubious in others … and rather absurd overall. The flat error is in...