Critical Reception
Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Space Cadet as "a long step forward. . . . The characters are stronger the background is carefully built, original, and convincing, the story suspenseful enough." Williamson noted that Heinlein was "perfecting the bildungsroman form that shapes the whole series."
P. Schuyler Miller gave the book a favorable review as "a first-rate historical novel of the near future," saying "So subtly has the scientific detail been interwoven with plot and action that the reader never realizes how painstakingly it has been worked out."
Read more about this topic: Space Cadet
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark—that is critical genius.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)