Critical Reactions
Jo Walton wrote: "In 1939, L. Sprague de Camp came up with one of the wonderful ideas of science fiction, the man taken out of his time to a time of lower technology ... As soon as Padway’s there, he puts his head down and starts to concentrate on what makes these books such fun—improvising technology from what he knows and can find around him. Padway starts with distilling and double-entry bookkeeping and makes his way up to newspapers and heliographs. ... The more you know history, the more you can see how clever the book is. ... De Camp was a historian of technology. His The Ancient Engineers (1963) is a Eurocentric but nevertheless fascinating non-fiction book."
Boucher and McComas praised the novel as "a witty version of the Connecticut Yankee theme, distinguished by its lore of Gothic Rome."
Read more about this topic: Lest Darkness Fall
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reactions:
“His misfortune was that he loved youth—he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant. That ardour could command him. It hadn’t worn out with years, this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it had nothing to do with Time.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)