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

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

She wrote in Better to Have Loved (2002), "Of course [Blish] was not fascist, antisemitic, or any of those terrible things, but every time he used the phrase, I saw red.

The premise emphasized Blish's understanding of microbiology, and featured microscopic humans engineered to live on a hostile planet's shallow pools of water.

The story proved to be among Blish's more popular and was anthologized in the first volume of Robert Silverberg's The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

John Clute said all of Blish's "deeply felt work" explored "confronting the Faustian (or Frankensteinian) man".

[10] The stories were loosely based on the Okie migration following the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and were influenced by Oswald Spengler's two-part Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West).

The stories detail the life of the Okies, humans who migrate throughout space looking for work in vast city-ships, powered by spindizzies, a type of anti-gravity engine.

The premise and plot reflected Blish's feelings on the state of western civilization, and his personal politics.

More stories followed: In 1956, They Shall Have Stars, which edited together "Bridge" and "At Death's End", and in 1958, Blish published The Triumph of Time.

Clute notes, "the brilliance of Cities in Flight does not lie in the assemblage of its parts, but in the momentum of the ideas embodied in it (albeit sometimes obscurely).

The story follows a Jesuit priest, Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, who visits the planet Lithia as a technical member of an expedition.

While on the planet they discover a race of bipedal reptilians that have perfected morality in what Ruiz-Sanchez says is "the absence of God", and theological complications ensue.

It was the first of a series including Doctor Mirabilis (1964) and the two-part story Black Easter (1968) and The Day After Judgment (1971).

The adapted short stories were generally based on draft scripts and contained different plot elements from the aired television episodes.

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

Blish credited his financial stability later in life to the Star Trek commission and the advance he received for Spock Must Die!.

[13]: 21 Blish was among the first literary critics of science fiction, and he judged works in the genre by the standards applied to "serious" literature.

[16] He took to task his fellow authors for deficiencies, such as bad grammar and a misunderstanding of scientific concepts, and the magazine editors who accepted and published such material without editorial intervention.

Blish is also 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.