You will recall from anthologies such brilliant Leiber stories as "Coming Attraction" and "A Bad Day for Sales" bitterly depicting a near-future American society in which present trends of sadism, exploitation and hypocrisy have reached their nadir of decadence. ["The Green Millennium"] is a full-scale novel of that society, evoked with Heinleinesque skill at detailed indirect exposition—and of how men rose from that nadir because a technologically unemployed young man happened to adopt a green cat and to glimpse a female satyr. It's a story as imaginative, unexpected, even surrealist as that odd but accurate synopsis indicates; and it's also a thundering action-melodrama, as it becomes apparent that the fate of the world hinges incredibly upon the green cat and every force in society, from the underworld to the Federal Bureau of Loyalty, concentrates on its capture. You may read this as an extraordinarily good suspense-thriller, or as the Writing on the Wall of a funhouse, reflecting in distorting mirrors the message that we are weighed in the balance; in either fashion, read it you must.
H. H. Holmes, "Science and Fantasy," in New York Herald Tribune (© I.H.T. Corporation; reprinted by permission), November 15, 1953, p. 14.∗
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