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:
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (18581915)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybodys face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (16671745)
“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 fallthe company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (18391894)