- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Tor Books (Aug 2 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0765302705
- ISBN-13: 978-0765302700
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 16.1 x 2.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 454 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #433,482 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Blend a madcap plot involving the legendary Fountain of Youth with a zany cast of barflies, garnish with a thin SF twist, and you've got the ingredients for the latest frothy concoction in Hugo-winner Robinson's (Callahan's Key) multivolume tall tale. Laid-back barkeep Jake Stonebender has been serving customers in The Place, a Key West saloon whose oddball patrons routinely tickle the space-time continuum and occasionally save the universe, for 10 years when he's touched for protection money by Little Tony Donuts, a humvee-sized mafioso who hopes to ingratiate himself with the Five Old Men who own everything in the world. Jake's scientifically precocious daughter, Erin, comes to the rescue with a scheme to sell Tony the fabled Fountain and "prove" its existence with increasingly youthful incarnations of herself conjured through time travel. Mishaps involving Erin's uptight truant officer, misuse of a timehopping gizmo, and-in the tale's soberest moment-terminal illness for one of the regulars, steer the story down fantastically unpredictable avenues. There's more mixer than hard stuff in this fruity farce, but the fare that keeps Robinson's fans coming back for another round-atrocious puns and song parodies, snickering SF in-jokes and the outrageous eccentricities of the series characters-is available in abundance. New and repeat visitors to Callahan's turf will find this a harmless diversion from more serious concerns.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
OK, it's really Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz and Willard the Professor's con. Callahan zapped out of his namesake series long ago and isn't answering his emergency phone. So when Zoey, Erin's mom, gets caught in hard vacuum, Jake, Erin's dad, convenes a neural bank to boost Erin's computer's capacity to calculate where in hard vacuum Zoey is. But that's getting ahead of the story, which begins when a board-of-ed inspector comes to assess whether 13-year-old Erin is receiving adequate home schooling. Now Erin was born smarter than the whole Callahan gang put together. She can teleport and time-travel--otherwise, why would she be the one to rescue Zoey? Anyway, the inspector's threat pales when a mastodon-size would-be Mafioso hits town (Key West) and starts shaking down the gang's watering hole, which Jake runs. Hence the con: gotta get ridda the gorilla. The wordplay flies fast and funny as always in a Callahan's romp, and the characters, regular and new, are pretty darn amusing. If only the long ending weren't so soppy. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
A little more than ten years after we had all arrived in Key West, saved the universe from annihilation, and settled back to have us some serious fun, bad ugliness and death came into my bar. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
A little more than ten years after we had all arrived in Key West, saved the universe from annihilation, and settled back to have us some serious fun, bad ugliness and death came into my bar. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quality total quality,
By
This review is from: Callahan's Con (Hardcover)
I expected this one to not be all that great after Callahans Key, I thought that was the end, and it was great. I was not expecting this at all. If you are a Callahan fan then this is where it is at. Buy it, read it, you will love it.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Callahan's Con is aptly named, cuz readers get conned fr 30,
By Alobar (West Chezzetcook, Nova Scotia Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Callahan's Con (Hardcover)
This is the first of Spider Robinson's books that I can honestly say sucked. Cal's Legacy wasn't real good, and I thought it time to retire Callahan's, but then Spider found the "key" and put out a fine installment. Yahoo, I bought his next book -- The Free Lunch -- in HC, and while not great, not bad, good enough to warrant shelling out for the HC of Cal's Con. Ohhh, if this were my intro to the wonderful world of Robinson, I would not return. If you haven't read, but are thinking of/wanting to, then may I suggest waiting for the SC; at least at ten bucks the disappointment won't be quite as monumental. Better idea, check it out from the library, cuz crap like it -- juevenile, illogical, and unimaginative -- should not be paid for. Bad enough it takes four hours to read. Heh Spider, I want a refund, or at least a discount on your next non-Callahan novel (I'm not giving up on him yet, but he's on, well, call it double-secret probation.)
2.0 out of 5 stars
Spider has done better in the past,
By
This review is from: Callahan's Con (Hardcover)
I have loved all of Spider Robinson's books about the Callahan bunch! However, this book just didn't meet the standard of his other works..
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