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:
“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)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“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)