Reception
Groff Conklin described City as a "strange and fascinating program . . . completely enthralling." Boucher and McComas praised the volume as "a high-water mark in science fiction writing," adding "Here is a book that caused these reviewers to chuck objective detachment out the window and emit a loud, partisan 'Whee!'.". P. Schuyler Miller placed the novel among the best sf books of 1952, although he felt the newly added interstitial matter was inferior to the original stories. In his "Books" column for F&SF, Damon Knight selected City as one of the 10 best sf books of the 1950s.
The book was also an important influence on French Marxist Henri Lefebvre and members of the avant-garde group the Situationist International, who used it as a point of departure for discussing how humans would survive in a world without work.
Read more about this topic: City (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)