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metal body her own, and she succeeds against all odds, in her chosen profession after her return as a cyborg. Victory is not inevitablethis is not Hollywoodbut even in defeat, we feel that it is still possible. Oliver, in "Vintage Season," has desperately tried to warn his contemporaries of the disasters the tourists know of but are bound by oath not to speak of. He is too sick to succeed. Here, realistically, is a portrait of someone who has done his best according to his or anybody's standards but was defeated by forces too strong for him. Yet, in another, less overpowering disaster, Oliver might well have succeeded; the story is tragic, but not defeatist. Likewise, Juille in Judgment Night fails because, while she tried her best, her best was informed by tragically wrongheaded values. Had she made other choices, she could have saved civilization, if not her empire. Victory is possible, if not inevitable.
To C. L. Moore, abilities, intelligence, and strength are unqualified good; evil only comes with the misuse of these abilities.
Patricia Mathews, "C. L. Moore's Classic Science Fiction," The Feminine Eye: Science Fiction and the Women Who Write It, ed. Tom Staicar (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1982), pp. 2122
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Robert Silverberg
Kuttner was prolific, versatile, clever, and technically adept. His stories were tightly constructed, but most of them prior to his marriage to Moore tended to be little more than facile pulp-magazine stuff. Moore's early work depended more on emotional intensity and evocative coloration than on intricacy of plot or swiftness of action; her stories were long and moody and slow, and often culminated in a swirl of powerful but impenetrable strangeness that defied rational analysis. Each writer thus complemented the other; and when they worked as collaborators they were triumphantly able to merge their strongest talents and produce fiction superior to anything either had done alone. That their work is largely out of print today is both saddening and perplexing to me. There were no science-fiction writers I studied more closely, in that enormously formative period of my teens, than C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner. In everything they wroteeven the stories that Kuttner seemed to have tossed off in an hour or two before lunch to pay the rentthey seemed supremely in command of their craft. I still feel that way about them; and I still go back

 
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