Reception
Reviewing the 1950 edition, Boucher and McComas described the series as "a high point in the application of sternest intellectual logic to screwball fantasy." Damon Knight characterized the series as "relaced, ribald adventure . . . priceless," saying that "no fantasy reader should be without them." P. Schuyler Miller declared that these "first and best of the Harold Shea stories," through the authors' "fiendishly clever application of symbolic logic", have "annexed the entire realm of "pure" fantasy to science fiction."
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 Incomplete Enchanter
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s 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 (1667–1745)
“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)