A Torrent of Faces

by James Blish

Book by Blish, James

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Dystopia

286 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

James Benjamin Blish was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. Blish also wrote literary criticism of science fiction using the pen-name William Atheling Jr.

In the late 1930's to the early 1940's, Blish was a member of the Futurians.

Blish trained as a biologist at Rutgers and Columbia University, and spent 1942–1944 as a medical technician in the U.S. Army. After the war he became the science editor for the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. His first published story appeared in 1940, and his writing career progressed until he gave up his job to become a professional writer.

He is credited with coining the term gas giant, in the story "Solar Plexus" as it appeared in the anthology Beyond Human Ken, edited by Judith Merril. (The story was originally published in 1941, but that version did not contain the term; Blish apparently added it in a rewrite done for the anthology, which was first published in 1952.)

Blish was married to the literary agent Virginia Kidd from 1947 to 1963.

From 1962 to 1968, he worked for the Tobacco Institute.

Between 1967 and his death from lung cancer in 1975, Blish became the first author to write short story collections based upon the classic TV series Star Trek. In total, Blish wrote 11 volumes of short stories adapted from episodes of the 1960s TV series, as well as an original novel, Spock Must Die! in 1970 — the first original novel for adult readers based upon the series (since then hundreds more have been published). He died midway through writing Star Trek 12; his wife, J.A. Lawrence, completed the book, and later completed the adaptations in the volume Mudd's Angels.

Blish lived in Milford, Pennsylvania at Arrowhead until the mid-1960s. In 1968, Blish emigrated to England, and lived in Oxford until his death in 1975. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, near the grave of Kenneth Grahame.

His name in Greek is Τζέημς Μπλις"

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, at least it's better than Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

[Reet · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Rather fun to find. 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' "--Biblio.com

In this world, in 2024, where we are 8 billion people, we have so much competition for jobs. Water is at times scarce, famine happens because rich people like to fuck around with commodities.
Imagine if you can a world with a trillion people. Just imagine the amount of sewage that would happen from that many people. How could the world even cope with that?
Well in the 28th century, this is exactly what happens in this book, published in 1967.
This book gave me claustrophobia. Why did they let this happen? Well, is anybody doing anything about overpopulation now, in 2024? No.
" 'Nor should i - but how can we possibly find out without going there? What other possible solution to our present problem is there? Birth control has been a miserable failure, you know that as well as I do. The campaign of 2500 was as thorough as any such campaign could possibly be. Every living adult got ample, free supplies of the new pill, access to more at demand, and clear, easy instructions on when to swallow it. The compound itself is germicidal, mildly aphrodisiac and habit forming, in addition to being contraceptive - an Ideal combination. And what happened? This year the population is almost half again what it was in 2500!'
'That's perfectly true. If it hadn't been for the campaign, the population now would be double the 2500 figure. The trouble, marg't, is that in 2500 it was already too late for such a campaign to be more than palliative. It should have been started several centuries before that, even before the third War - which it might even have prevented. Back then, they had a real chance of reducing the rate of growth to a safe level. But the people who saw that clearly at the time were howled down.' "
Sigh.

A vacation destination that's popular in this shoulder to shoulder world is called the barrier Hilthon. It has so many floors, that go all the way down to the bottom of the sea, and Floors that are above the sea as well. I don't know how many millions of people it holds at one time, but it comes unmoored from its seabed anchor, and floats away and crashes into a cliff, breaking its wall where the sea flows in and drowns many people.
"the hotel went under swiftly. The sea poured over the seawall and flooded the beach. The picturesque Driftwood fragments floated away. And narrowing ring of foam climbed the red, white, and Blue Dome until the summit of the radio and video Aerial atop the flyport control tower disappeared in an Eddy of foam and driftwood. The pumps shifted ballast at top speed; the hotel gradually righted herself and came to rest on the oozy bottom with the top of her control tower 150 ft below the surface.
Those who had been waiting on the Windswept Airfield of the flyport and on the outdoor beach had been washed away and left floundering in the stormy nocturnal sea. Each felt that his last moment of Life had come. But the Sleek flanks of dolphins rose on either side, pressed against them, and bore them up. The hands of Tritons reached up from below, supported them, and towed them toward the wave-tossed submersibles.
A preliminary report on the number of known casualties, the extent of the damage to the barrier hilthon, and the state of its automatic Services had been delivered to the monitors by the master computer. The flood of telephone calls from terrified guests was being handled by computers in the lower echelons of the electronic hierarchy. A moment of silence prevailed in the control room. The submergence of the flyport Aerial had closed that Avenue of communication with the outside world. The thoughts of all 25 monitors were essentially, 'what now? What do we do next?' "
...
" the second message was from the sewage processing plant:
'how soon will movement of outbound cargo be feasible? We are storing compressed blocks of processed sewage solids in vacated rooms and Halls immediately above us. Storage problem not yet critical but suggest early removal to Mainland fertilizer plant for esthetic reasons. L'
'How did they dispose of the processed solids under normal conditions?' Jothan said.
'a special freighter came every day and removed the accumulation. '
'isn't there some Provisions for discharging sewage into the sea in an emergency?'
'No. The designers of the barrier Hilthon didn't foresee this kind of an emergency, any more than they foresaw that a day would come when the hotel would have to ration its food supply.. "

And...
" 'I'm happy to hear it,' Beyon said gloomily. 'but - maybe I'm just exhausted, dorthy, but to tell you the truth, I don't think the mess is remediable - not anymore. If there was ever any hope of solving the population problem, it should have been tackled no later than the 21st century - even if it had to involve something mildly oppressive, like compulsory sterilization injections. I told Marg't that, back before we even knew about flavia, but she wasn't listening to me even then. Sure, it would have been difficult, choosing the candidates, and choosing the people to choose them. As soon as you start talking about human reproduction, everything turns out to be sacred.
'But we never even tried to face up to the difficulties. Instead, we ducked them - in the name of humanitarianism. We let ourselves be sold on the notion that we could never have too many people, not even if they were standing on each other's feet. And we threw everything we had into just one effort- to accommodate everybody, and not just adequately, but in luxury.
'Well, we made it for a while, quite a long while. But it was bound to break down sooner or later. If it hadn't been flavia, it would have been something else, now or later. It turned out to be now, that's all.' "

The seriously makes me want to tear my hair out. When I was in high school, back in the late sixties, we had to read a book called "the population bomb," I forget what class it was for. It was by Dr Paul Ehrlich and he was raising the alarm that something needed to be done about overpopulation, that the world could not support that many people. I have never understood why nobody will say anything about this. And here we are with 8 billion people, and not only that; the rich are screaming for people to make more babies, to have more slaves to make money for them. That social security is not sustainable without enough young people.

[Robert Hepple · Rating 3 out of 5]

A James Blish novel of 1968 written in collaboration with Norman L Knight. My 1978 Arrow edition has an amazing Chris Foss cover. The setting is an overcrowded Earth 800 years hence with a world population of one trillion, run by a corporate fascist state. The treatment of social change resulting from such population pressures, or various technology changes, seems naïve and simplistic, whilst the random episodic style of the plot is a likely result of the novel being an extended tie-up of short stories published in Galaxy and Analog magazines between 1965 and 1967. Despite these drawbacks, the novel makes an enjoyable read in a distinctly 1960s way.

[Garrigan Stafford · Rating 2 out of 5]

First I’ll say that my copy was marketed as a “novel”. This isn’t really a novel. It wasn’t until I saw the description here that I realized it was a collection of short stories. Marketing this as a novel and structuring it as a novel was a mistake and made my enjoyment less.

Now some good things. The world building is quite comprehensive and interesting. There is a lot going on with the spaces and are neat ideas. There are also some creative scenes in here such as with the hotel, the mad man in the tunnels, and the forest walk. The authors also are pretty good at describing the tense moments.

Some bad things. It’s boring. If you really like world building maybe it wouldn’t bother you, but I felt as if it was overkill. Just so much time spent on describing this society. I’m a vacuum this isn’t bad, but there is little to no central conflict. Part of this problem is in the structure. It’s a collection of short stories pretending to be a novel, so a lot of description is repeated, and there isn’t a “central plot” as the stories are only loosely related. As short stories this could be fine, as a novel it is very boring.

This leads into another problem, the conflicts are short, easily resolved, and have more to do with physical issues instead of characters. Everyone once in a while a full conflict or tragedy will occur, it will be exciting for a minute or two, then the “genius technocrats” immediately have a plan to fix it and that plan works immediately. The one exception to this was the Gitler tragedy, that one was fun, lots of turns, and a wild conclusion. If you have this book, I’d almost say just read that middle story, it’s the best one. However, it is the exception not the rule.

Also, there isn’t much relation between the big conflicts. They end up feeling rushed and random. The triton human relationship? The full impact of flavia? What happened to the hotel? All of these questions are brushed off to move onto the next mini conflict which ends up feeling hollow.

As for any themes, it’s clear to me the authors is a bit of a STEM lord and has a decent amount of misanthropy. (I know it could they wrote it from a perspective but knowing 1960s sci fi authors I do feel like the author is coming through the book). In this utopia each person running is some genius scientists engineer who handles things and has disdain for the rest of humanity. Note this is considered a utopia as by the foreword of the book. There is little discussion of the disgusting lazy motivation-less “unemployed” of the society, it is merely assumed by the narrators that what life is. At one point they almost enter a possibly interesting scenario where a technocrat interacts with normal people and it could of been interesting. But it was quickly side stepped by meeting a technocrat in disguise effectively. I don’t necessarily think that the setup here is not a good starting point for an interesting play, educated technocrats with complete control of the world corps compared to the unemployed masses on somewhat luxury that have little agency in their lives but are required to maintain life by the corps. It could be an interesting dynamic when challenged. However it never is. Instead it’s merely assumed that the unemployed are dumb and lazy and just watch TV all day, a point reiterated multiple times.

All in all this was an ok read that was overall boring but contained some good starts for interesting ideas. However it seemed the authors were more intent on world building and writing up engineering solutions than in the potentially interesting character dynamics they had created (the tritons or the unemployed for example). So I would say this is effectively engineering and state craft fan fiction and really reads as such.

[Gian Marco · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a while, I had avoided this novel, as the premises did not sound particularly intriguing.

Boy, was I wrong.

"A torrent of faces" is a cataclysmic tour de force on how much more damage any disaster can cause in an overpopulated world.

The search for meaning of characters that find themselves in unprecedented situations in a world that only gives the impression of being fully automated is thrilling.

The psychological details in the telling of three romances are also very accurate, never bland, and downright realistic when juxtaposed to times of crisis such as the main events of the book.

I particularly liked the three main characters: the pragmatic Biond, the unrelenting Jothen, and the resourceful however insecure Dorthy.

Like in several Blish novels, there is a quantity of marine-based sci-fi material in the story, with Tritons being newly engineered human beings that can communicate with dolphins (he was OBSESSED by dolphins, I think, by this point), and while I wonder what Norman L. Knight, the co-author, must have thought about that, I must say that some of the best parts of the book also come from the section that mostly deals with them, except perhaps the very end of the segment - that just felt like a little bit too much fantasy.

All in all, I found this to be a remarkable, thrilling novel, which puts disasters together much better than many well known movies, without sacrificing on the human element.

[Samuel Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a charming read. It's one of those big-picture wide-screen novels that treats itself to the conceit of a dramatis personae (including billing an asteroid that impacts the Earth late in the novel) and was probably edgy when it came out but has not aged well and, as a result, the story seems overly in love with its own devices and terribly pleased with its own daring.

In the 28th Century, the Earth hosts a population of one trillion people. They keep people fed and happy by extreme organization. The story is a series of episodes that show what's going on in the world and how the characters navigate it.

Good enough work, as it's aged, but there's a reason that it's not named amongst the great SF books from the period; it's pretty banal.

[Orin Buck]

This book, when I read it around when this edition came out in 1968, gave me the name for our times that I would always use, "The Age of Waste." On just re-reading it, I found the reference three times, however there is no big explication of how our times earned that epithet. But it's obvious, as it was obvious in 1968.
Finding here that the book was woven out of short stories, the structure seems less odd. I think the combination is successful, resulting in a wide exploration of how an 800-year-old utopia on Earth faces new challenges. It's like an earlier (and lower word-count) "Stand On Zanzibar," John Brunner's Hugo Award winner.

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the 28th century, Earth has 1 trillion people and is being threatened by a series of disasters.

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly relevant Sci-fi from 1967.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great concepts. Paint-by-numbers plot. Cardboard characters. Dubious politics (unsurprisingly).

[bluetyson]

isbn,original

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent dystopian science fiction "novel" co-authored with Norman L. Knight. The operant theme is overpopulation.

[SciFiOne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Co-author Norman L. Knight. Grade B.

[Steven]

James Blish & Norman L. Knight