As seems to be the all too frequent case with SF writers Keith Roberts is full of excellent and imaginative ideas yet executes his stories—which are, for the most part, nothing more than vehicles for them, or dramatic illustrations of them—with a singular lack of style and conviction. The first half of [Machines and Men] comprises pieces concerned with intrusions on the 'normal order'. These intrusions are natural—the basic elements of SF can be counted on the fingers of one (human) hand—of a temporal, technological and telepathic nature. Anxious to provide recognisable, safe and ordinary contemporary backdrops as a contrast to the phenomenal events depicted the author sets three stories in provincial English towns and peoples them with characters who might be best described as saloon bar odd-balls…. These mostly unappealing characters find themselves involved in adventures of strange, bizarre, weird and totally predictable sorts. The best service the reviewer can render Roberts is to list his ideas, his initial premises, his really quite inspired fancies. They include murder by telepathy …, a form of cinematic representation which goes far beyond 3-D, the use of subliminal data in feature films and the delightful device for improving a car's performance employed by a shipwrecked navigator from outer space who lands in the Black Country….

The stories in 'Man' are all set in future and distinctly dystopian societies. Roberts writes these pieces in the third person which is a welcome relief after his assumption of facile guises and his attempts to 'characterise' the various 'I's of the first half of the book. 'Therapy 2000', the most recently written, is quite the most engrossing of these fantasies, and not simply because its postulation is the easiest to entertain, to accept as probable…. In this story Roberts shows an uncharacteristic restraint and paints a detailed daub of a truly horrific, noisy, cramped environment and relates his tragicomic tale of a rather pathetic man with a deadpan sureness. Other futures he invents include a submarine village and an England where perpetual war is waged between drivers and pedestrians—an altogether conceivable contingency, as readers of 'Autocar' will appreciate. (p. 81)

In 'Yesterday's Tomorrows' which promised much but turned out to be little more than a catalogue Armitage tended to classify those who speculated on the future, somewhat arbitrarily it seemed, as 'optimistic' or 'pessimistic'—he thus ignored the literary qualities of the works he discussed and considered them as no more or less than blueprints. Now it occurs to me that maybe this is the way that SF writers consider that they should be judged, if judged they must be. Such matters as the fineness of the writing …, the magic of their devices, the harmony of conception and discharge, the subtlety of their characters and so on are of little importance compared to their 'originality', the newness of their stabs at what's to come…. In which case I suppose that this book is probably a lot better than I've given it credit for. (pp. 81-2)