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Page 147
C. L. Moore's, and two, "The Devil We Know" and "Exit the Professor," to be equally pure Kuttner.
To dispose of these first: "Vintage Season" is the hauntingly memorable story, from Astounding, about the brief visit of a group of cruel pleasure-seekers from the future, which fairly drips with a blend of love, luxury and feara specific emotional color, so intense that you can almost taste it. The story is a rounded whole, complete and perfect in itself, except for a rather awkwardly prolonged ending. In an unfolding puzzle story like this one, the argument and the physical action ought to come to a point at once, like the intersection of a fist and a chin.
"The Devil We Know" is a deplorable potboiler from Unknown, with one paragraph of good writing in itthe description of the demon on page 55-; the rest is bromides and desperation. "Exit the Professor" is one of the funniest of the unfailingly funny Hogben stories; these, I have said before, belong in a book of their own.
The two remaining stories, "Home There's No Returning" and "Two-Handed Engine" are recent ones; the latter was published in Fantasy and Science Fiction for August, 1955; the former appears for the first time in this book. Both are about robots, a subject which has intrigued the Kuttners separately before.
Here it's no longer possible even to guess what part is Kuttner's and what Moore's: the hypnotically deft treatment of Deirdre's robot body in "No Woman Born" is clearly echoed in these stories, but so is the ingenious improvisation of ENIAC in "The Ego Machine." The result is a series of brilliant and penetrating images, in which the robot, that clanking servitor of hack writers, becomes a vehicle for allegory and symbol. The blunt weapon suddenly has a point so sharp and fine that it tickles you at the heart before you know you have been touched.
"Home There's No Returning" deals with the robot as savior, and has a stiff little moral at the end: "Two-Handed Engine" deals with the robot as destroyerthe Fury of Greek myth, who pursues a malefactor to his doom. Which of the two stories you like better probably depends partly on the meaning these symbols have for you, and partly on how far the emotional experience succeeds in distracting you from the details of the plotting. Stripped of their elaborations, both plots are banal; the sociological backgrounds are no better than they should be, and the other sciences are worse; in one, the physical action of the story is so arbitrarily arranged as to be flatly incredible. Yet these are stories you won't soon forget: probably because

 
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