< previous page page_159 next page >

Page 159
In its revised form, The Space Merchants, this novel is even smoother and more entertaining in plot, but I have not been able to read more than a few pages at a time before the background gives me the whillies.
Will the Senator from Nutra-Cola please take the floor?
Robert A. W. Lowndes, [Review of The Space Merchants], Dynamic Science Fiction 1, No. 6 (January 1954): 26, 36
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Anthony Boucher
In one of the oddest and most individual of recent imaginative novels (Search the Sky), the authors of last year's admirable The Space Merchants combine an ingenious scientific theme (the effect of known genetic laws on small planetary colonies) with a lively picaresque adventure novel, in which our hero zooms along a transgalactic Yellow Brick Road, escaping perils and adding strange companions to his entourage. But the primary emphasis is on neither science nor adventure, but on a series of satires in the grand tradition of the eighteenth century's Imaginary Voyages. For each planet encountered represents a reductio ad absurdum of some trend in contemporary civilizationone ruled by women, one by "senior citizens," one that has achieved absolute conformity, and so on. You may, like me, refuse to believe that all of these civilizations can have diverged so, over the course of centuries, with no linguistic changes at all; but suspension of disbelief is easily attained in a tale so animated, adroit, witty and, in short, sheerly entertaining as this.
Anthony Boucher (as "H. H. Holmes"), [Review of Search the Sky], New York Herald Tribune Books, 21 February 1954, p. 13
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
S. E. Cotts
Perhaps the most outstanding feature (of Tomorrow Times Seven) is Pohl's own brand of humor which provides the main tone of the volume. He does not try to force it on the reader by blunt or obvious satire. It is humor of a far more elusive kind. As nearly as it can be pinned down, it seems to rely on taking some of Earth's seedier characters and putting them in contact with some of the most original outworlders this reviewer has ever seen. Thus, in "Survival Kit," we follow the fortunes of a petty crook as he tries to make a dishonest dollar out of a time traveler. In "The Gentle Venusian," an alcoholic survey man from Earth has a run-

 
< previous page page_159 next page >