Callahan's Con (Callahan's Crosstime Saloon Series) (Mass Market Paperback)

by Spider Robinson (Author) "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..." (more)
Key Phrases: field inspector, ten mil, Key West, Tony Donuts, Duval Street (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books (June 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765341654
• ISBN-13: 978-0765341655
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #220,143 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best of a classic series., September 13, 2004

By	James Yanni (Bellefontaine Neighbors, Mo. USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The last few of the books derived from the old "Callhan's" series had seemed somewhat of a letdown from the older books; not that they were bad, but I didn't enjoy them nearly as much as I had the originals. I was beginning to wonder if it was me, not them; if I had changed sufficiently as I aged from my twenties into my forties that I could no longer appreciate the kind of story I'd enjoyed then.

I'm still not sure, but this book was definitely back on a par with the older entries in the series; it was flawed (so were they, if you looked hard enough) but it was good enough to overcome its flaws. More, it was good enough to overcome one of the flaws that really bothered me about the previous entry, "Callahan's Key"; I can't say too much without giving a spoiler, but suffice it to say that I don't expect Jake and the other Callahan's regulars to be insensitive jerks; they don't prejudge people simply because they're alien cyborgs, or sentient computer networks; it seemed wrong that they would prejudge someone just because she was (A) ugly and (B) had a silly name. The fact that they did made it pretty clear that Spider was, and that bothered me; in this book, we get his apology (via Jake).

If you've tried the Callahan's books before and found them pointless and silly, your opinion of this one will be the same. If you loved them all, you'll certainly love this one. If you've felt that they'd been slipping for a while, give this one a try; you may enjoy it. If you've NEVER tried the Callahan's books before, then if you like your science fiction WEIRD, well-written and moving in spite of being silly, you will probably enjoy this book, but you might want to read some of the earlier entries in the series first.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spider at his best!, July 19, 2003

By	J. M. Schroeder (Clermont, FL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Callahan's Con (Hardcover)

The best books are the ones that make you feel deeply and this one does. Naturally, I laughed a lot, that's the nature of Callahan's in any of it's incarnations. But I cried, too, and that reminded me of the roots of what the Callahan stories were about.

Now that the regulars have all settled down in Key West, enjoy this story of just a few days in the life of the denizens of "The Place". There are sprinklings of literary references throughout that are a lot of fun, too. Enjoy!

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Laughter with a Heart, September 29, 2003

By	Patrick Shepherd "hyperpat" (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Callahan's Con (Hardcover)

Jake Stonebender just can't get any peace. Having saved the universe twice and the Earth at least three times, does he now get a little break from busybody bureaucrats? Of course not - mainly because, if he did, Spider would have had no story to tell. So we open this latest segment in the Callahan saga with the entrance of the bureaucrat from hell in the person of Senior Field Inspector Czrjghbczl of the Florida Department of Education, wondering just what is being done about the education of Erin, Jake's daughter, and if her home environment is conducive to producing a fine, wholesome, upstanding lady. Of course, Jake's explanation of the situation is upstaged by his rather non-standard denizens of The Place, especially by the talking dog Ralph and the equally unusual deer Alf, and the sudden appearance of Erin herself, sans clothes - and then things really start to go downhill.

One problem is never enough for a Callahan novel, so the appearance of Tony Donuts, Jr. demanding protection money is par for the course. To fully appreciate the gravity of the appearance of this persona, you need to have read Callahan's Lady, but even without that benefit, this current incarnation of the man-mountain is suitably threatening and just bright enough to foil simple solutions.

The early portion of this book, where the above situations are laid out, is hilariously funny, replete with Spider's trademark groan-inducing puns, fractured syntax, tall tales, incredible characters, biting satire, and song spoofs - Spider at his best. But when he turns to how to solve these twin problems, some of the fun seems to go away. The 'con' that The Place gang of very unusual beings comes up with is far from original (how many have been scammed by being sold the whereabouts of The Fountain of Youth?), although the particular implementation of this scam has some very unique aspects. When the Donut problem is solved, Spider now invents a new problem - his wife has gone time-travelling (without appropriate spatial correction) in an attempt to find out what was going on with her daughter while operating the scam. And the only way to find her calls for, once more, (and one time too many), the gang to get together in a telepathic group bond. This seemed to me to be unnecessary padding, and the real ending to the story would have read just as well without this incident thrown in.

There are multiple references throughout this book to happenings in other Callahan books, many insider jokes from the SF field, and even at one point an underhanded reference to Spider's musical recordings (he has a fine voice that should be more well-known, but such are the vagaries of the music business). All rather standard for a Callahan novel, but I did feel he may have overdone it a little in this one, possibly making it difficult for someone who hasn't read the rest of the Callahan books to completely follow and understand the relevance of these earlier happenings to the current goings-on.

The ending is something of a tear-jerker, though underplayed and very quietly done, and shows the other side of Spider - emotionally sensitive, thoughtful, fully aware of not only man's foibles but his occasional grandeur, and with something important to impart to his readers. Beyond the jokes, puns, and side-splitting tales, this is what keeps me coming back to Spider, and lifts this book back up from the trough in the middle section to being not only enjoyable but worthwhile.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)