Title A Logic Named Joe Series --- Editor Murray Leinster Cover Art --- Publisher Baen - 2005 First Printing Various Category Anthology Warnings --- Main Characters See below Main Elements Science Fiction, Djinn

• A Logic Named Joe
• Dear Charles
• Gateway to Elsewhere
• The Duplicators
• The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator
• The Pirates of Zan

Three complete novels, one of them a Hugo Award finalist, with a number of short stories.

The Pirates of Zan - When a young man is accused of being one of the Pirates of Zan and jailed unjustly, he is given a secret offer-in return for being permitted to "escape," he must shake up the establishment, which is getting set in its ways. He succeeds beyond anyone's wildest expectations, becoming not just a pirate, but the deadliest do-gooder in the galaxy.

Gateway to Elsewhere - Suppose that in another dimension, the world of the Arabian Nights is real, including very powerful and very dangerous djinns, who are nothing like Aladdin's big blue pal. A man from our world wouldn't have a chance against them ... or, would he?

The Duplicators - A planet with a machine which can duplicate anything would be the wealthiest world in the galaxy, right? Wrong. And unless the hapless voyager who's trapped on the planet can find a solution to its problem, he isn't going to live to leave again. Plus three short stories, including "A Logic Named Joe," an uncannily prophetic story of home computers and the internet - written in 1946.

I found this anthology on the Baen Free Library however it is no longer available there, most were removed when ebooks started selling, fortunately I downloaded them when they were available.

A Logic Named Joe - This was an impressively prescient description of Google and the Internet and Siri/Alexa and the risks of having access to all possible information. I mean we make a big deal these days about governments needing to be transparent, to make information available to the masses, but where are the limits? Should you be allowed to access your neighbour's criminal records? What about knowing their bank balance? Should you be able to ask an AI what is the best way to rob a bank? Fortunately we currently do have a balance these days.

Dear Charles is a tale of a man writing a letter to his future descendant, basically telling him in the most snarky way about how he was going to jump to the future, fall in love with his great-great-great-grandson's fiancee, bring her back to the present and make what was going to be his wife into his great-great-great-grandmother. It was odd but amusing.

Gateway to Elsewhere - was kind of of long, but I guess it was supposed to be a short novel. A man discovers a coin from a place that doesn't exist, and using it discovers that there are parallel dimensions that touch in various places that are about the same in both places, while other parts can vary wildly. Like where a legend of djinns and djinees in one place is very much reality in another. Other than my taking forever to get through it (I've not been using my ereader much as I no longer commute to work) it was silly and fun, but might have worked better had it been a short story rather than a near novel-length.

The Duplicators - I got through this a lot faster since I decided spending two months reading this book I needed to finish it eventually! We find ourselves in a lost colony of humans on a planet originally populated by intelligent pigs called Uffts (and it is arguable who of the two are actually smarter, both seemed to be lacking in their own way). But what makes this colony special is that they have something called a duplie which allows you to duplicate any object so long as you have the proper source materials. Sounds great until you realize that you no longer need farmers since you really only need a couple apples, and you don't need to know how to make clothes, since you can just copy the one you have. Basically all need for labour and innovation is lost. Thus Link, our protagonist, realizes that while a man without scruples could make a quick fortune off of this tech, it would also destroy society as we know it. Oh, and he also needs to lead an Ufft revolt...it was intriguing and while it kept my interest, was not one of my favorites of this collection.

The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator - this one was a short story, just a perfect length to explore what kind of disasters a time machine could produce. Imagine you put a coin on a tray, then the machine just reaches back in time and brings forward a copy of the original coin to the future, and it does so over and over again. Now, not sure if that really works, since unlike the duplicators in the previous story, then the original coin should no longer exist since it's past was changed and so doesn't exist but, anyway. Coins are one thing but bills have serial numbers. And if you have an avaricious fiancee, she might find herself crawling into the machine and duplicating herself. And oh, there's a kangaroo too. A kind of comedy of errors that was a bit of fun even if it didn't entirely make complete sense.

The Pirates of Zan - is a tale of a man who grew up a pirate and is now an electrical engineer. However he lives on a world that doesn't really feel the need to improve their current technology, after a civilized world doesn't like change, it might cause, you know, excitement. So Bron is forced on the run to a different world, one which might have a bit more excitement than he expected leading to, well, the very thing he tried to get away from, piracy. I mean what can you do if you happen to be really good at it?

I feel, if you enjoy the kind of humour you find in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy you will find something to enjoy here. In all the stories you have protagonists that seem to take the absurd and the ridiculous more or less in stride, and it certainly likes to poke fun at what we consider ideal (e.g. civilization is so good that we need tranquilizers to stop us from going crazy from boredom). On the whole I was amused a bit, and some made you think, but it's not my favorite kind of writing style. Most characters are two-dimensional out of necessity, since they are meant to be a charicature of some concept that needed to have fun poked at it. And while I found that worked really well in the short stories, the novels, though short, just felt overly long. But hey, for a free read I can't complain!