Reception
Frederik Pohl reported that Vance had "pretty carefully" worked out his extrapolation, but that "it isn't terribly convincing as presented". Pohl also noted that "Vance writes well -- sometimes even brilliantly", but that his prose sometimes seemed uneven and artificial.
David Langford cited Vance's "engaging speculation", but concluded that the protagonist "seems too weak a character for his leading role", while "the culture and landscape of Pao are grey and ill-defined, in strong contrast to the exotically colourful societies and ecologies which became Vance's trademark".
Read more about this topic: The Languages Of Pao
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)
“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)