26 Facts About James Blish

James Benjamin Blish was an American science fiction and fantasy writer.

James Blish is best known for his Cities in Flight novels and his series of Star Trek novelizations written with his wife, J A Lawrence.

James Blish is credited with creating the term "gas giant" to refer to large planetary bodies.

James Blish's first published stories appeared in Super Science Stories and Amazing Stories.

James Blish was born on May 23,1921, at East Orange, New Jersey.

James Blish attended meetings of the Futurian Science Fiction Society in New York City during this period.

James Blish was drafted into Army service, and he served briefly as a medical laboratory technician.

James Blish did not complete the program, opting to write fiction full-time.

From 1962 to 1968, James Blish worked for the Tobacco Institute as a writer and critic.

James Blish died on July 30,1975 from complications related to lung cancer.

James Blish would revisit, revise, and often expand on previously written stories.

John Clute said all of James Blish's "deeply felt work" explored "confronting the Faustian man".

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction asserts that not until the 1950s, and the Okie sequence of stories beginning their run, "did it become clear [James Blish] would become a [science fiction] writer of unusual depth".

In 1955, James Blish collected the four stories together into an omnibus titled Earthman, Come Home, published by Putnam.

James Blish continued to rework older stories, and did so for one of his best known works, A Case of Conscience.

Bantam Books commissioned James Blish to adapt episodes of Star Trek.

James Blish's work remained uncredited until the final volume, Star Trek 12, published in 1977, two years after Blish's death.

The introduction to Mudd's Angels acknowledges this, stating that James Blish left the two stories in various stages of completion and they were finished by Lawrence; James Blish does not receive author credit on the book.

James Blish was among the first literary critics of science fiction, and he judged works in the genre by the standards applied to "serious" literature.

James Blish's critiques were published in "fanzines" in the 1950s under the pseudonym William Atheling Jr.

James Blish described the persona of Atheling as "acidulous, assertive, categorical, conscientious and occasionally idiosyncratic".

James Blish is credited with coining the term gas giant, first used in the story "Solar Plexus", collected in the anthology Beyond Human Ken, edited by Judith Merril.

James Blish reworked the story, changing the description of a large magnetic field to "a magnetic field of some strength nearby, one that didn't belong to the invisible gas giant revolving half a million miles away".

James Blish's work was published by a variety of publishers in the United Kingdom and the United States, often with variations between editions, and with different titles.

James Blish expanded and re-published his older work on numerous occasions.

James Blish's works continued to be re-published after his death.