Other writers to explore the cycles of civilisations in their works include James Blish, who studied the works of Oswald Spengler and whose novel "Cities in Flight" (which includes 4 novels: "They Shall Have Stars", "A Life for the Stars", "Earthman Come Home", and "The Triumph of Time") portray the rise and fall of the galaxy as an inevitable cycle, of which (unlike in other dystopian SF stories of the 1940s and 1950s) the use of machine technology is merely a symptom not the actual cause, and culminate, as in Wollheim's eighth stage, with the end of the universe and the birth of a new one.