{"id":583,"date":"2021-02-16T22:39:12","date_gmt":"2021-02-16T22:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=583"},"modified":"2021-03-15T20:00:17","modified_gmt":"2021-03-15T20:00:17","slug":"multum-in-parvo-by-jack-sharkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=583","title":{"rendered":"Multum in Parvo by Jack Sharkey"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><em>Multum in Parvo<\/em><\/strong> by Jack Sharkey (<em>The Gent<\/em>, December 1959)<sup>1<\/sup> isn\u2019t actually a short story but a quartet of vignettes that each end in a pun (or two, or have them all the way through)\u2014Feghoots, as I believe they are called in the SF field.<sup>2<\/sup><br>The first, <em>Robots<\/em>, is a fairly straightforward piece involving the construction of a card-playing robot in 1653, which builds to a decent single pun ending; the second, <em>Aircraft<\/em>, has Icarus flying towards the sun with a double pun ending, both of which are both okay; the third, <em>Vampirism<\/em>, really goes for it, and has eight puns (maybe more) on the way through\u2014this is the best of the four by country mile; the last one, <em>Atomic Fission<\/em>, has a decent single pun ending and a coda about fallout that I didn\u2019t get (the <em>Vampirism<\/em> one would have made for a stronger finish).<br>I\u2019m not big on puns but this was okay, with the third section having considerably more bite than the others. Boom, <em>tish<\/em>.<br><br>1. In <em>The Great SF Stories 21 (1959)<\/em>, edited by Isaac Asimov &amp; Martin H. Greenberg (which includes this story), the editors report on two further \u2018Pavro\u2019 stories in <em>Gent<\/em> magazine (which are not listed on ISFDB): <em>Son of Multum in Parvo<\/em> and <em>Son of Multum in Parvo Rides Again<\/em>.<br><br>2. The Wikipedia article on <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Feghoot\">Feghoots<\/a>.<br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Multum in Parvo by Jack Sharkey (The Gent, December 1959)1 isn\u2019t actually a short story but a quartet of vignettes that each end in a pun (or two, or have them all the way through)\u2014Feghoots, as I believe they are called in the SF field.2The first, Robots, is a fairly straightforward piece involving the construction [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[168,17,166,12,167],"class_list":["post-583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jack-sharkey","tag-168","tag-17","tag-jack-sharkey","tag-short-story","tag-the-gent"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=583"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":836,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583\/revisions\/836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}