The novel “And All the Stars a Stage” by James Blish was published for the first time in 1960 serialized in the magazine “Amazing Science Fiction” and in 1971 as a book.
Jorn Birn does not have many prospects in a world where there’s a strong predominance of men and an equally strong competition for the favors of the small minority of women. One possibility comes from a space program that aims to test faster-than-light propulsion. Jorn is selected to be trained as a navigator and accepts knowing that the mission will be experimental and very risky.
Everything changes when the study of anomalies detected in solar activity leads to the conclusion that the Sun will explode within a few years. Even by concentrating all the efforts of the world, only a small percentage of human beings can survive and the selection of the crews of the available spaceships is very strict. Jorn Birn will fly one of them in search of a habitable planet.
In the novel “And All the Stars a Stage”, James Blish takes us into a strange future where advances in children’s gender selection led to a population where women are few and very important. The many men are at a disadvantage with various social ramifications. This and more totally changes with the prospect of humanity’s extinction and the need to leave the Earth before the Sun explodes.
James Blish specialized in biological sciences but also included elements of other sciences in his works. Decades after the novel’s publication, some parts are dated while others found confirmation. Actually, that interstellar stage is used by James Blish above all to show humanity’s reactions to the catastrophe and the search for a new home, so the scientific elements are functional to the plot and sometimes made up.
The results are variable, especially with regard to astronomy. Today we know that the Sun is too small to explode, so one of the novel’s foundations is out of date. While traveling through space, the survivors pass by various planetary systems and one of them includes what is defined as a gas supergiant, an object too large to be a planet but too small to be a star, an object that is now called a brown dwarf.
The survivors’ journey into space takes several subjective years, so there are various leaps forward in time. It’s perhaps the part that suffers most from the novel’s limited length because it gives the impression of sudden changes in their situation. It’s one of the cases in which you think that the novel would have been much longer if it had been written at a later time. An author like James Blish could have developed the plot, characters, and the many themes with greater strength. For example, the familiars, creatures created in the laboratory, and the relationship they have with men are developed in a limited way.
In some ways, “And All the Stars a Stage” is all wrong in the sense that the pace is very uneven, very few characters have a real characterization and in some cases that’s over the top, there’s a lot of exposition, and many themes have little space to be developed in a novel that is short by today’s standards. Despite this, James Blish manages a non-trivial tale of the efforts made to save humanity from extinction. It has flaws and outdated parts, yet I think it may still be worth reading.
