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stretching of definitions, it might be so classified; but primarily this book is for those readers who rejoiced in T. H. White's The Once and Future King and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and have ever since then thirsted for comparable delights. |
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Anthony Boucher (as "H. H. Holmes"), "Into Another World," New York Herald Tribune Books, 17 September 1961, p. 14 |
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"Escape from Orbit" (in Time and Stars) is a technique-problem story; the consulting expert is called in to resolve the emergency in space, where three men are trapped and doomed to die unless he can, by exercising technical ingenuity in an office on Earth's surface, so arrange the available materials and data as to bring them safely down. |
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As we all know, this story when well done affirms many ideals for us. It is done very well here. But it isn't the real story. What Anderson has really been doing with this structure is brought forward and recapitulated at the end, when the exhausted hero, his dealings with the inflexible Universe satisfactorily concluded, now has to go home and get his kid off to school. The wife who has been phoning him for help with her routine household problems while he was figuring orbits has been so drained by her difficulties that she has slept through the ringing of the alarm clock. |
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Anderson's technical execution of this story is superb. The most important of the many subtle objectives he set out to reachand he reached every one I could detect at allwas to make this a profoundly optimistic and ennobling story. He has at least added a new dimension to what seemed to be a completely rounded science-fiction form. I actually believe he has wiped it out and substituted something much more genuinely satisfying and truer to life, but that remains to be seen. |
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One thing that impresses me most distinctly is that Anderson shows the hero manipulating the supposedly difficult problem by wireless, but having to fend off the wife's problems with stopgaps and finally having to go home in person, not to solve but merely to alleviate one specific among them. I doubt very much whether this story was intended to be merely about one man and one wife, or cabbages and kings; I believe it was intended to be about whatever energy-sink each of us has; we all have themso do our wives, kids and kings. I think one thing you could say about this story, if you had only one thing to say, would be that it is about where entropy |
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