< previous page page_150 next page >

Page 150
love withcome to watch voyeuristically the destruction of his city and his own demise. As in "The Bright Illusion" (1934), where the Great God's priestess and the Great Goddess's priest can only realize their love in death because they are of different species, the planetary worlds of SF repeatedly allow Moore to dramatize the gulf between men and women. Her image for the two sexes is that they come from different worlds, with different cultures and languages and different physical forms. The two main characters in this storypriest and priestesscannot realize their love until they leave their physical form because each finds the other's appearance repulsive. If, as Eric Rabkin, Robert Scholes, and a number of other theoreticians of the genre argue, SF provides a "narrative world . . . at least somewhat different from our own," for female SF writers at least up to Moore's time the world that is ''our own" is inexorably patriarchal, and the "different" term is the female, seen now in all her alienation. But this means that "our own" is really theirs, and that "they" are really "us." It is in its play with such categories that SF by women distinguishes itself.
Susan Gubar, "C. L. Moore and the Conventions of Women's Science Fiction," Science-Fiction Studies 7, No. 1 (March 1980): 2021
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Frederick Shroyer
Reading Kuttner's fiction, one is first struck by the extent and precision of his vocabulary. It was with him as with Mark Twain, who said that the difference between the right word and the almost right word was the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Kuttner was also a master of plotting, dialogue, and, not infrequently, three-dimensional characterization. Although he was imitative in his early years, he soon achieved his own style.
All in all, it is probably the humor that sets Kuttner's work apart from earlier science fiction. The genre was, in the main, deadly serious and didactic. Kuttner galvanized it with an often zany humor that is truly memorable. One need but read his Galloway Gallegher stories (collected in book form in 1952 as Robots Have No Tails), which featured an entirely "human" robot named Joe, to realize that robots could never be the same again after Joe, petulant and opinionated, emerged fully assembled from the author's mind. Beyond this humor was an inventive, imaginative bent that often resulted in stories that throw new light on the human predicament.

 
< previous page page_150 next page >