David Lindsay, in Voyage to Arcturus. It's a remarkable thing, because scientifically it's nonsense, the style is appalling, and yet this ghastly vision comes through.

C. S. Lewis, “C. S. Lewis Discusses Science Fiction with Kingsley

In spite of a prose which is occasionally rude and awkward, in spite of characters which appear and vanish before, in some instances, we can quite grasp their significance, in spite of a plethora of overdramatic names like Maskull and Nightspore, Lindsay has produced a book which it is difficult if not impossible to lay down …

Loren Eiseley, “Introduction,” A Voyage to Arcturus

In general, Van Vogt seems to me to fail consistently as a writer in these elementary ways:

The wonder is that, using such unlikely materials and adapting them without a grain of common sense … the author should have produced a narrative on the whole so lively and readable. The references to atomics in the story [Empire of the Atom] are nonsense from beginning to end; so are those to strategy and tactics; even the multiplication is wrong; and yet Van Vogt's single-minded power maniacs exert their usual fascination.

Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder

All of us who are old enough have used Poe, but none of us has ever got to be a better writer – a manager of words – by that use… [in Eliot's words] … “If we examine his work in detail, we seem to find in it nothing but slipshod writing, puerile thinking unsupported by wide reading or profound scholarship, haphazard experiments in various types of writing … without perfection in any detail.” … [Poe's] force works through, not with, the language. At his more ordinary levels, his force gains nothing and sometimes loses a good deal because of the language in which he deploys it.