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Page 146
And yet, automatic though some of the writing seems to be, the story is beautifully rounded as a structure, and, as is usual with the Kuttners, does not contain an unnecessary word. As a writing team the Kuttners evidently subscribe to Chekhov's principle of plot economy (the Russian writer once remarked that if in a story he mentioned that an ornamental gun hung on the wall of a room, that gun must go off before the story is over). For a single example, note the mention in "Humpty Dumpty" of the way Cody perceives the minds of the goldfish. Any other writer would have been so pleased with this as a bit of coloring matterfor, while it's logical enough that a telepath should be able to read the minds of animals, few other writers in the field would have conveyed the point in so bizarre a way that he would have let it stand just as it was. Not so the Kuttners; that bit of color has to be for something, not just color for its own sake, and so toward the end of the story the goldfish are used as a springboard into understanding the mind of the child. This, gentlemen, is story-telling; and if more than half of (John W.) Campbell's current stable could be forced to drink from the Kuttners' goldfish pond, Astounding would be a hell of a lot more readable than it is these days.
James Blish (as "William Atheling, Jr."), "Negative Judgments" (195354), The Issue at Hand: Studies in Contemporary Magazine Science Fiction (Chicago: Advent, 1964), pp. 8991
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Damon Knight
When Kuttner married Catherine Moore in 1940, two seemingly discordant talents merged. Kuttner's previous stories had been superficial and clever, well constructed but without much content or conviction; Moore had written moody fantasies, meaningful but a little thin. In the forties, working together, they began to turn out stories in which the practical solidity of Kuttner's plots seemed to provide a vessel for Moore's poetic imagination. Probably the truth is a good deal more complex; the Kuttners themselves say they do not know any more which of them wrote what (and I've always been uncertain whether to review them as a single or double author); at any rate, the two elements still seem to be present, and separable, in their work.
The Ballantine collection, No Boundaries, gives only a taste of this blending: of the five stories, I take one, "Vintage Season," to be almost entirely

 
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