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Kuttner is about as agile a man with a typewriter as science-fiction possesses, and it is no secret that in these and practically all of his other stories of the last decade he has had the expert help of his wife, otherwise known as C. (for Catherine) L. Moore. When this impressive duo sets out to construct a story that is funny (as in the title yarn), you are going to find yourself laughing out loud; when they want to throw a scare into you (witness "The Twonky" and "Mimsy Were the Borogoves"), you will not escape the sensation of teetering at the edge of a dangerous height. The world the Kuttners create is a nightmare worldnightmare fear, and even nightmare humorbut it is a nightmare you'll want to explore, at a safe distance. |
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Frederik Pohl, [Review of A Gnome There Was and Other Tales of Science Fiction and Fantasy], Super Science Stories 8, No. 1 (April 1951): 3738 |
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Henry Kuttner and his wife, C. L. Moore, have written science-fantasy under nineteen names (of which the best known is Lewis Padgett); and although publishers have made vain attempts to distinguish their identities, they say "It is almost impossible now to tell which of us wrote what part of any particular story." As a collective entity, they are best described as the author who once began (and, da capo, closed) a science fiction novel with the line "The doorknob opened a blue eye and looked at him," and who memorably made strict science fiction out of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." |
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They bring to science fiction the surrealistic (but logical) vividness of the best fantasy. They are among the most imaginative, technically skilled and literarily adroit of all today's science-fantasy writers; and this volume of 60,000 of their better words is a top-ranking newsstand bargain. The ten stories appeared during the last eleven years under four of their assorted names; two have been previously anthologized, which makes their inclusion regrettable, when so much first-rate Kuttner-Moore remains unreprinted. But it's still a book to be bought, not only by the enthusiast, but by the short-story reader who thinks he doesn't like science fiction. |
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Anthony Boucher (as "H. H. Holmes"), [Review of Ahead of Time], New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 19 July 1953, p. 12 |
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