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Page 151
One memorable story has a great deal to say about the differences between children and adults. Entitled "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (1943), it tells of a scientist of the far future who uses a box of his children's old toys as ballast for a time-transportation experiment. The box lands in the present, and two children, finding it, begin to play with the toys therein. They are instructional toys. The flexible, unquestioning minds of the two children accept the new ideas the future toys generate without difficulty. The more they learn from their play, the farther they are drawn toward a new, farfuture world where their parents can't follow. The assumption is that when Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland, he knew of this transitional path along which only young children can walk. Adults are puzzled by Carroll's interpolated verselines such as "All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe"and they are too inflexible in their thinking to follow this path; but children, with the right guidance, can walk the maze unerringly into a new world, leaving the old one and its adults behind them. With this story, Kuttner rubs shoulders, and as an equal, with H. G. Wells and his tale "The Magic Shop.''
Frederick Shroyer, "C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner," Science Fiction Writers, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982), p. 166
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Patricia Mathews
Whether science fiction or fantasy, (the) works by C. L. Moore all share a set of definable and complex values reflected in their plots. First among these values is her basic belief that people's actions matter. All the battles Jirel of Joiry fights are won by her own actions, directly, as when she fights her way out of a trap ("Hellsgarde") or, indirectly, when she enlists an ally, whose actions help her in victory ("The Dark Land"). In "Vintage Season," what the tourists do, or deliberately refrain from doing, have the harshest of consequences. In "No Woman Born," the entire issue is what Harris will do, what Malzer will do, and most of all, what Deirdre will do. Even in Judgment Night, the most fatalistic of all Moore's works, in which every plan comes to disaster, the defeats are based on the failure of human beings to make the right decisions and to do the right thing, not on whim or chance or a malignant or playful universe.
Not only do people's actions matter, but in Moore's universe, victory is possible, given will, intelligence, and strength. Jirel of Joiry triumphs, always, by her own efforts. Deirdre, in "No Woman Born," succeeds in making a

 
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