I read a collection of short Science Fiction stories some time ago, all of which were about a city or some particular cities. One of the stories had the major cities of Earth literally taking flight away from the planet. New York City was the focus of the story.
Does anyone remember the name of the story and/or the collection?
Bonus question: I’m also looking for a book, the name of which I thought was The Ulleran Revolution, but alas can’t find anything on it. It’s also a Science Fiction book. Another memory is that the local sentient life on the planet concerned is fond of saying Znidd suddabit.
You might have read one of the individual novels rather than the whole schebang, but the New York-flying-into-space book is James Blish’s Cities in Flight. It’s been published as a 4-in-1 for the last couple of decades, but was originally the four separate novels Earthman, Come Home, They Shall Have Stars, The Triumph of Time and A Life for the Stars. The Amazon page (with reviews and some plot summary) is here.
That’s not a short story, you might say. Well, that’s true. But the novels are all pretty short, so they might have been included in some big fat anthology. Alternatively, you might have read an excerpt or part of one of the novels. But these are the famous New York in space stories, so I doubt you’re remembering anything else.
The other one I’m less sure of, but could it H. Bean Piper’s Uller Uprising?
The early Cities in Flight novels weren’t really novels but collections of individual stories mostly first published in Astounding Science Fiction. The stories in Earthman Come Home, for example are “Earthman, Come Home”, “Okie”, “Bindlestiff”, and “Sargasso of Lost Cities”. Although Blish wrote intervening chapters to tie them together, they still read like a collection of short stories.
Since others have identified the first book as Cities in Flight, I will confirm G.B.H. Hornswoggler’s guess that your second book is Uller Uprising. The “suddabit” phrase is definitely from that book.