Most helpful customer reviews
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1.0 out of 5 stars
How are the mighty fallen...., Jun 17 2004
By A Customer
I am a HUGE fan of Spider Robinson, but this excursion strained my fanhood beyond belief. The first three Callahan's books (collections of short stories) were witty, compelling, and worth re-reading. The rest, such as The Callahan Touch and Callahan's Key (Callahan's Lady and Lady Slings the Booze are exempted) were masturbatory crap. Mr. Robinson has forgotten the lessons he learned at the master's knee (that would be Heinlein) and engaged in a witless journey to the Florida Keys (albeit a location that deserves attention) that promotes purposeless drug use and fornication with minors (granted, super-genius minors). Mr. Robinson, I loved both you and Heinlein. But Heinlein knew how far was too far. A man traveling 2000 years into the past to court his mother was plausible. A toddler propositioning her father is not. And frankly, people who smoke dope are just not that amusing, unless you are interested in debating the relative merits of various brands of potato chip. You are in a select in-group that is composed of intelligent people--don't make the rest of us feel stupid by peppering your books with references to other readers, writers, musicians, etc., without explaining them. Heinlein educated us, you just flaunt your "superior" knowledge. I have an IQ of 163, but your tangents left me clueless as Heinlein's never did. I think you need to go back to the rules you had to follow when writing the short stories. And guess what--you can't make the world more accepting of sex by creating a toddler with a foul mouth.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
More Callahan, please, Sep 29 2003
If insanity is your thing, try the group that hang out with Jake Stonebender and whatever bar they haven't destroyed yet. The puns come fast and furious and the friendship is always on tap at the place where the motto is "shared pain is lessened, shared joy increased." In Callahan's Key, the third entry from the second Callahan series (i.e., not starring Mike Callahan, proprietor of Callahan's Place in the first series), Jake Stonebender (the proprietor of Mary's Place until it was destroyed by a small nuclear weapon), his wife Zoey, and their superintelligent toddler Erin, take off with the usual gang of misfits to Key West to find a location for another bar. While in Travis McGee Land, they meet up with a whole new bunch of misfits, including Robert Heinlein's cat, Pixel, star of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Travel along with them in their two dozen buses on a Keseyesque journey to their new home, wherever that is. Spider Robinson specializes in this kind of light SF, where the characters matter more than the plot (such that there is). He makes writing look easy as the words just roll off his mind into yours with no need for any real processing. But as we all know, being funny stuff usually takes more work than being serious. Thus, the talent of Spider Robinson is awed the world over.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
About the worst of the Callahan books, sadly..., Jan 7 2003
It's not a total stinker, but boy, does this thing drag on, and on, and on, and on... The move to Florida seems to take about 20 chapters or so, and Spider don't really bother much with plot for the most part. It's a meandering ramble of a book, and I don't prefer that to the format these have taken before. It's a whole lot of "Oh, isn't Florida COOL?" That is what really drags this book down, not to mention makes it rather dull. I still like the characters, but they need more purpose than to wait around until the 1990's. And as someone else put it, saving the world again is getting well, boring. Can't they do something else for a change? Hell, take them off-planet for all I care, just do something different.I also really wasn't fond of the new omnipotent characters. This universe may be farfetched, but (a) the wishful thinking of bringing Nikola Tesla back from the dead, and (b) Erin, the genius toddler who's already handing out numbers for sex partners (EW ... I cannot BELIEVE he went there) and goes up in a shuttle went way beyond "credibility", if you know what I mean. I wouldn't mind if Erin met a horrible death. And I wish that Spider had made up his own genius inventor instead of resurrecting an old one so he could make him hip and cool as opposed to incredibly neurotic. I gotta say that I wish I hadn't paid hardback price for this, but had borrowed a paperback in the library. Unless Spider takes a drastic turn from where he's meandered the characters to in this one, this series sadly needs to be put to bed. I just read Lady Slings The Booze and am feeling homesick for how things used to be.
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by Spider Robinson
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