James Blish's A Light to Fight By

 A Light to Fight By

by James Blish

Penthouse, June, 1972

The June, 1972 issue of Penthouse magazine featured a short story from sci-fi writer James Blish.

'A Light to Fight By' is mildly sci-fi. It's set in a near-future New York City where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is wider and the police are prone to addressing street incidents via interdicting with armored vehicles.

Protagonist Ken Cassidy is a white savior (back in '72, the term was revered, mind you) who has turned aside a potential lucrative career as a stockbroker to instead provide counseling and supervision to Puerto Rican youth patronizing the Third Avenue Youth Center in East Harlem.

Ken had served in Vietnam, and upon arriving back in the City, had undergone a transformation:

When Ken had come back, he had made the mistake of going to see the quiet Puerto Rican who had been his First Sergeant; and there he had seen also the families jammed together five and six to a room, the kids just able to walk playing with empty beer cans for lack of a better toy, the 12 year-old boys hustling their 13 year-old sisters, the useless young men blustering and shooting craps or pitching pennies by the stoops, the screaming bruised women, the black-eyed unwanted babies, the dried old men who had arrived too late to learn English....and the cops hovering around them, waiting for any damn excuse at all to bring one of their expensively armored riot-control crawlers.

Wow......what a terse, hardboiled, description of life in the dark corners of the American dream !

Facetiousness aside, I found 'A Light' to be one of the better fiction works of Blish that I have yet read (although, to be honest, I tend not to seek out his stuff). The story has a subversive little twist at its end that keeps it from being yet another glib Moral Message about discrimination, poverty, and privilege.

Unfortunately, 'A Light to Fight By' doesn't appear in any of the Blish story collections published to date, probably because it's not a sci-fi tale.

So, I'm going to post the printed pages here at the PorPor Blog. They are as legible as I can make them from 300 dpi scans of a 52 year-old magazine............