Inevitably, perhaps, there are no emotions in Coma, a brash, oddly fascinating and unintentionally hilarious fantasy about black market tissue-transplants. Its author is a scuba-diving medical instructor at Harvard who admits in an admonitory epilogue to having recently acquired 'a heightened regard for female physicians and female medical students'. And so, out of a formula of medical jargon and behaviourist psychology, he has created a female character of the purest plastic…. As a story, Coma has a fairly high rating on the hedonic calculus, often inducing that sudden tightening of the throat muscles which is a sure indication that the patient is about to laugh.

Tom Paulin, "Head-Knowledge," in New Statesman (© 1977 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. 94, No. 2422, August 19, 1977, p. 251.∗