Reception
While "The Last of the Masters" was little noticed in the years immediately following its publication, it was reviewed after its 1980 publication in The Golden Man collection. Fellow science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch reviewed Dick's The Golden Man collection among other works in "Fluff and Fizzles", an essay dated to 1979, but published in a 1980 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. While celebrating several stories in the collection, and proclaiming to readers the "categorical imperative" of buying a copy, he nonetheless derided most of its contents as "turkeys", citing specifically "The Last of the Masters" as an example. Referring to the story as "a hyperkinetic foray into hairy-chested-style hugger-mugger", Disch also mocked its "action-packed denouement" involving Edward Tolby as an example of "bogus machismo".
In her 1982 review of the Golden Man collection, Hazel Pierce lauded the sophistication of the story, summarizing the theme of "The Last of the Masters" as an examination of "the paradoxical cast of human existence."
Read more about this topic: The Last Of The Masters
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)
“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)
“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)