{"id":1887,"date":"2014-02-08T22:13:39","date_gmt":"2014-02-09T06:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1887"},"modified":"2014-02-08T22:13:39","modified_gmt":"2014-02-09T06:13:39","slug":"review-cosmic-laughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1887","title":{"rendered":"Review: Cosmic Laughter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What a strange and beautiful world it is in which I get to reread <em>Cosmic Laughter<\/em>. <em>Laughter<\/em> is a collection, edited by Joe Haldeman, of light hearted science fiction and fantasy that I first happened on when I was 10 or 12 years old.\u00a0 I borrowed it on more than one occasion from the Steele Memorial Library in Elmira and read it back to back. Rereading it was more polishing the memories than reading a book.<\/p>\n<p>So, it&#8217;s not like this will be unbiased.<\/p>\n<p>Each of the stories has a nice twist to it, or a great setup.\u00a0 For instance, &#8220;Gallagher Plus,&#8221; by Henry Kuttner remains one of the great set-ups of all time &#8211; man who is a brilliant inventor only when drunk wakes from a bender with a strange machine humming, no money, and a few clues to indicate he&#8217;s taken more than one commission &#8211; some of whom are already angry.\u00a0 The execution doesn&#8217;t live up to the possibilities, but oh the possibility of it.\u00a0 Andrew J. Offut&#8217;s &#8220;The Black Sorcerer of the Black Castle&#8221; hits the perfect spot between send-up and homage to R. E. Howard, and Damon Knight&#8217;s &#8220;To Serve Man&#8221; is everything it&#8217;s known for.\u00a0 The best of the lot is Haldeman&#8217;s own &#8220;Eye of Newton&#8221; in which a mathematician summons a demon and uses logic to get out of it.\u00a0 It&#8217;s breezy and just long enough to build up some suspense without overstaying its welcome.<\/p>\n<p>All fun stuff.<\/p>\n<p>Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What a strange and beautiful world it is in which I get to reread Cosmic Laughter. Laughter is a collection, edited by Joe Haldeman, of light hearted science fiction and fantasy that I first happened on when I was 10 or 12 years old.\u00a0 I borrowed it on more than one occasion from the Steele [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1887"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1889,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1887\/revisions\/1889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}