Aphelion Review # 3

Callahan's Legacy

By Spider Robinson

Review by Dan L. Hollifield


Type of music/work: Novel -- 7th (as far as I can determine) in a series

Musicians/Performers/Author(s): Spider Robinson

General impressions of the album/book:
If you like having fun, then you want to buy this book!

Specifics:
Filled to overflowing with puns, tall tales, life & love, wit & warmth, and biographical details of the regulars of Callahan's Bar, and Mary's Place. Once again, Spider takes us into a world where pain shared is pain lessened and Joy shared is joy increased. If you have yet to discover the Callahan's books, this might not be the best one to use as an introduction. However, the characters will earn your love no matter which story you first read. In this one, you learn more of the histories of several of the major characters in the series, attend a birth, save the world (again), and get raided by the cops. Each volume in the series gets better and better, and you grow to love the characters more and more.

Everything in this one is well thought out- No half-measures here! But Spider Robinson fans have come to expect no less of his work, so that's no real surprise. Each character springs to life from the pages, they're so real you'll swear that you've met them somewhere in your own life.

Background info:
The Callahan's stories have been around since the early '70s- first as short stories in Analog Magazine, then as collections of short stories, then finally as novels.

Other titles to look for are:

Callahan's Legacy made it to paperback in '97 (if I'm reading the printing history correctly), so it should be time for Spider to be working on another one. It's true that Callahan's Lady and Lady Slings the Booze are set in Lady Sally's House rather than Callahan's Bar or Mary's Place, but some of the characters appear in all of these books so I count them all as being intertwined. But then, I'm not a strict constructionist anyway. I'm just a fan. And as long as Spider keeps writing, I'm going to be a very happy fan indeed.


Review Copyright 1997 by Dan L. Hollifield




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