Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is our discussion of the short story....

"Laughter At The Academy" by Seanan McGuire

From the scifi anthology The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination, part of our discussion of The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination anthology.

This story didn't really entertain me much. It starts with a strangely entertaining premise of a world where scientists periodically turn into evil, mad scientists, so much so that there's an agency tasked with monitoring scientists to prevent or mitigate.

Unfortunately, I thought the storytelling from there was rather flat, and it didn't have much either funny or exciting to add to that premise. It all just felt pro forma after the first paragraph. There might be an entertaining story based on this concept, but this one isn't it.

**

I guess humour wasn't a pre-requisite of this anthology, there was one that was downright depressing. But I agree I had to work a bit harder to get through this one and the twist wasn't so much of one. It also jumped around a fair amount, and with one character borrowing names from other characters at times I got confused (remember I'm reading this while commuting so my reading is broken up into more than one session too, that didn't help with the flow)

I found it rather flat, although horrific in an understated way. I just couldn't really get into the characters, though.

Andrea wrote: "I guess humour wasn't a pre-requisite of this anthology, ..."

I guess my thought on it was that if you start with an intentionally silly premise, the story that follows ought to be funny. I'm not sure I see the point of trying to write a serious treatment of such an oddball premise.