Reception
Reviewing the 1950 edition, Boucher and McComas faulted the novel for weakness in plotting, but described the series as "a high point in the application of sternest intellectual logic to screwball fantasy.". P. Schuyler Miller, despite finding that Castle "hasn't quite the adroitness of incongruity which marked the first book," still reviewed it favorably, saying the authors "learnedly but irreverently wreak the same havoc with Ariosto that they did with Spenser's "Faerie Queene" and the Norse eddas."
Damon Knight characterized the series as "relaced, ribald adventure . . . priceless," saying that "no fantasy reader should be without them." In 1977, Richard A. Lupoff described the series as "whole planes above the hackneyed gut-spillers and skull-smashers that pass for heroic fantasy."
Read more about this topic: The Castle Of Iron
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)
“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 (1858–1915)
“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)