[To Ride Pegasus] deals in parapsychology. Future Earthlings who have a flair for precognition (referred to modestly by the characters as "my Talent") live and work at The Center, monitoring the thoughts and immediate future of a big American city and giving warnings of impending aircrashes, earthquakes and outbursts of homicide. The four linked stories are like episodes of The Streets of San Francisco scripted by Mme Blavatsky, with the cops using tranquilizer guns in the shoot-outs. What is so unexpected is that Mrs McCaffrey's writing should be uproariously funny. She has a satirical grasp of such a wide range of banality that she should rightly think of it as her Talent…. In fact, Mrs McCaffrey is most funny when she is pretending to be serious. Whether she means to be funny, who knows?

James Hamilton-Paterson, "Space Enough, and Time," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd...