Callahan's Con
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- £4.49
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- £4.49
Publisher Description
Jake Stonebender's bar in Key West gets a visit from mafioso Tony Donuts, who is looking for "protection money". Jake and the barflies have other challenges as well, as when Jake's wife is suddenly lost in a space-time continuum... Publishers Weekly says, "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."
"If one were given the task of creating Spider Robinson from scratch, the best way to do it would be to snatch James Joyce from history, force-feed him Marx Brothers films and good jazz for the better part of a decade, then turn him loose on a world badly in need of a look at itself."
- The Vancouver Sun
Spider Robinson is the hottest writer to hit science fiction since Harlan Ellison, and he can match the master’s frenetic energy and emotional intensity, arm-break for gut-wrench.”
- The Los Angeles Times
“Nobody’s perfect, but Spider comes pretty damned close.”
- Ben Bova
"Spider Robinson is the Tom Robbins of the 21st century."
- John Varley
Spider Robinson is a master storyteller…"
- Allen Steele
[Spider Robinson] "embodies the best of Sturgeon, Heinlein, and Asimov."
- David Gerrold
"Robinson's creative imagination is admirable."
- Publishers Weekly
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.
