Wagoner is eventually convicted of treason by an oppressive regime, but not before he has sent out expeditions (in a later book, it is revealed that they succeed in establishing thriving colonies).

Reviewing a later edition, the Hartford Courant described the novel as "a skillful mixture of human reality and technological fantasy".

[4] In the period in between the first and second parts, the Cold War ended with the peaceful merging of the Eastern and Western blocs into a single, planet-wide Soviet-ruled dictatorship, which hardly made any perceptible change, as the West's political system had already become virtually identical with the Soviet one.

However, this dictatorial power was broken by the spindizzy drive which becomes more efficient as more mass is affected, so that dissidents and malcontents have an easy way of escaping and going off into space.

A Life for the Stars (1962) is a bildungsroman describing the adventures of sixteen-year-old Chris deFord, born when the above process of migration had already been going on for a considerable time.

After several adventures, Chris is fortunate to be transferred to the much more prosperous New York (or at least the Manhattan portion of it), a major "Okie" city under Mayor John Amalfi.

Impressed, Amalfi elevates him to the newly created position of city manager of New York and gives him the status of resident rather than passenger (and thus entitled to anti-agathic drugs).

It describes the many adventures of New York under Amalfi, amongst a galaxy which has planets settled, at different periods of history, under loose control by Earth.

After an economic collapse causes a galactic depression, New York ends up in a "Jungle", where Okie cities orbit a dying red giant star while waiting for work.

Amalfi realises that the "Vegan Orbital Fort", a semi-mythical remnant of the previously dominant alien civilisation, is hiding among the Okies.

In typical fashion, Amalfi swindles the IMT residents and sets their spindizzy engineers to fly the city off the planet, where they are destroyed by Earth Police ships.

[7] The Dillon-Wagoner Graviton Polarity Generator, known colloquially as the spindizzy, is a fictitious anti-gravity device imagined by Blish in Cities in Flight.

In the year 2010 omnibus edition, these flying Okie cities are named (but many more are mentioned): And one city which is not described as flying: The spindizzy was used in at least two novels by Jesse Franklin Bone, The Lani People and Confederation Matador, and appears as the nickname for fictional Heim Theory devices in Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel.