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in with the law on Venus, where the creatures spend their entire lives playing games. In "The Day of the Boomer Dukes," a New York gang collides with another time traveler.
The spice and originality of these ideas are further enhanced by the author's invention of certain delicious words for names of men and objects, and by the contrasting dialogue between the Earth people and the Spacers. And if in the ends of most of the stories, the aliens seem to get the best of us or have the last word, no one can really object because it is all such good fun.
S. E. Cotts, [Review of Tomorrow Times Seven], Amazing Stories 33, No. 2 (November 1959): 13940
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Kingsley Amis
(Pohl's) field of interest is contemporary urban society and its chain of production and consumption. He is thus in some sort a novelist of economic man, or, rather, of two overlapping personages within that concept, the well-to-do customer and the high-level executive who keeps the consumer consuming. An occasional space-ship flashes across his page, but no BEM (bug-eyed monster) ever raises its heads there and aliens do not appeal to him; the adventure-story component of his work is incidental. His mode is typically the satirical utopia, with comic-inferno elements rarely absent; his method is selective exaggeration of observable features of our society, plus the concrete elaboration noted in (Robert) Sheckley.
Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), pp. 118-19
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Damon Knight
Like one of John Campbell's psionics machines, the heads of Frederik Pohl's characters are empty except for little cards labeled "career soldier," or "con man," or whatever. In the stories collected as Tomorrow Times Seven, they gabble brightly at each other, pose and pirouette through the motions of frantic plots. Pohl's ideas are ingenious, his backgrounds carefully detailed, his pace swift. Over and over again, his greedy people are scheming, conniving, sweating to get their hands on something of valuein ''The Haunted Corpse," a mind-transferring gadget; in "The Gentle Venusian," diamond-studded boomerangs; in "The Day of

 
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