About book Callahan's Legacy (Mary's Place, #2) (1997)
Spider Robinson is weird.The plot is thus: a giant evil alien lizard (with 3 breasts) is on its way to destroy the earth. So the main characters decide to share how they all first came to be a barfly at Mike Callahan's tavern. In short.I can't help but feel by this stage Robinson was getting a teensy bit too comfortable with...expressing himself. And, like I said above, Spider Robinson is weird. Not bad weird, just...neutral weird. At least, his perception of reality is a bit skewed (in a lovely, upbeat, positive-themed way though).For example, for the vibe of acceptance and friendliness pervelant through the entire series, I've always found the idea of having Fast Eddie blackjack someone for asking questions gives the whole place a kind of sinister edge. Seriously, here one new guy asked one question and he's already reaching for his piece.The problem is the denizens of Mary's Place are portrayed as being just too level headed, too calm, too accepting of everything, too perfect. In the stories within, one character we learnt once killed a guy in a knife fight, and says the act "felt so good the only thing I can liken it to is orgasm"...and the other characters assure him that that's perfectly fine because the guy "had it coming". Uhh, ok. Creepy.Another tells the (ok, pretty awful) tale of his upbringing as a young bisexual kid in conservative America. An innocent man (his Uncle) gets imprisoned, a priest uses him as a boytoy, all pretty horrendous stuff. But then it ends with the argument that the biggest crime is that "nobody asked [him]" about how he felt about his sexual relationship with his Uncle, and that a thirteen year old kid is perfectly capable of making reasoned decisions about their sex life. Up to and including sex with adults. What.Yeah. Weird. But...ok, the above two examples are narrowing out the strangest, most confronting parts of an otherwise harmless, and ultimately upbeat and fun novel. It's just...weird.
Spider Robinson is the only author whose short stories I like better than his longer works. This book is basically an elongated short story, and takes place over a very short time frame. I like the “main plot”, but the B plot that bookends the story is fairly disappointing. It's an unfortunate mix of half extremely believable and in-character for Jake, and half very out of character and hard to believe. The “big bad outer space threat” of the book is handled well (if entirely derivatively compared to his earlier works), but the secondary antagonist plot is very unsatisfying.This book introduces some fairly glaring (if unimportant) continuity errors, especially with respect to the magical coffee machine. A big deal is made of its name and origination in the previous book, but here the name and functionality changes and it's treated as basically any other machine.
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After getting part of the way thru Callahan's Con - I realized that I had only a dim memory of the previous books... in checking my bookshelf, I found I had copies of Callahan's Key and Callahan's Touch, but not this one, so I checked it out from the library. I wasn't missing much. It was a better book than Con was, but that's not saying a whole lot. In this installment, Zoey Berkowitz Stonebender is 9 1/2 months pregnant, and Mary and Mickey show up with a Scout on their tail. So, once again, the Gang has to save the world while dealing with an impending birth. Solace (the Internet made sentient) plays a fairly major part - and the back stories of a couple of original Callahanians (Doc, Long-Drink and Fast Eddie) are told - one of which was pretty damned hard for me to read. Again - this is not the book to pick up if you're new to the Callahan's series - start at the beginning with Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. Spider explores a couple of interesting concepts and inflicts some really awful puns in this book - but he's not writing as well as he can. Library or used book recommendation at best.Great review by Tasha Robinson. She says what I wanted to say, but couldn't find the words.
—Tracey
