Reception
Critic Don D'Ammassa rated the piece one of de Camp's "best stories", and placed it among those "of particular note" among de Camp's "many memorable short stories." Roland Green, writing for Booklist, called it of "outstanding merit" and one of the author's "vintage short pieces." To Tom Easton, it "is a classic explsition of the time-travel paradox," and de Camp "always one of my favorite SF&F writers." Harry Turtledove called the story "a fine specimen of the for-want-of-a-nail story: a small change in the past producing enormous ramifications as the centuries roll by," with "things so easy as the thought they would be ... a common theme in de Camp's work."
Read more about this topic: Aristotle And The Gun
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“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)