From rec.arts.sf.written Thu Aug 20 13:33:29 1992 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Path: herkules.sssab.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!decwrl!csus.edu!netcom.com!dani From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) Subject: Robinson: Starseed Message-ID: <9c!n!+k.dani@netcom.com> Date: Wed, 19 Aug 92 06:44:57 GMT Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest) Lines: 20 "Starseed", by Spider and Jean Robinson, is out in paperback, but don't expect a second "Stardance". The difference between "Starseed" and "Stardance" is much the same as the difference between the later Callahans books and the early ones: It's a wallow, not a story. Oh, there is the skeleton of a story. A woman goes to the space habitat where those who wish to become true space dwellers are trained; we share a hundred pages of guided tour with her; a menace is revealed and -- as in most of Spider Robinson's books -- is dealt with semi-miraculously. It's not much of a plot, but it's not supposed to be. The main point of the book is for the authors to convey, and for the readers to wallow in, a warm fuzzy feeling. ----- Dani Zweig dani@netcom.com If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you! -- Dorothy Parker From archive Fri Aug 21 13:23:20 MDT 1992 From: flee@gondor.psu.edu (Felix Lee) Subject: Time_Pressure, by Spider Robinson Date: 17 Nov 87 14:30:27 GMT Time_Pressure Spider Robinson Ace Books, 1987 When I finished it, my thought was, "This should have been a short story." It's an okay idea poorly done. It is 1973, and a beautiful woman time traveller has just dropped into the backwoods of Nova Scotia. But the book is really about the hippie culture that lives in retreat in the Canadian wilderness. Most of the narrative is pretty dull: The woodshed grunted a dire warning as I passed. I ignored it; it had been threatening to fall over ever since I had known it, back in the days when it had been a goat-shed. As I went by the outhouse I half turned to see if the new plastic window I'd stapled up last week had torn itself to pieces yet, and as I saw that it had, a shingle left the tiny roof with the sound of a busted E-string and came spinning at my eyes like a ninja deathstar. I'm pretty quick, but the distance was short and the closing velocity high; I took most of it on my hat but a corner of it put a small slice on my forehead. I was almost glad then for the cold. It numbed my forehead, the bleeding stopped fairly quickly for a forehead wound, and what there was swiftly froze and could be easily brushed off. [p. 5] This sort of thing continues for the next hundred pages. Relatively little happens in the first half of the book. It's mostly descriptions of Canadian wilderness in winter, portraits of hippies and hippie culture, self-conscious references to science fiction, various episodes of sex, and Heinlein-esque conversations about love. Then, all of a sudden, you're bombarded with the climax. After that, it just peters out. A major theme of the book is Cosmic Oneness, but the narrator (Sam) is an outsider: I had loved no one; few had loved me. I had pissed away my talent. I had, in general and with rare exceptions, hated my neighbour. I had left the music business when the folk music market collapsed--not because I didn't like other kinds of music; I did--but because folk music was the only kind you could play alone. I had never truly learned to stand other people. [p. 185] Reading 200 pages of this person's introspection tried my patience. SERIOUS SPOILER WARNING. Time_Pressure is a sequel to Mindkiller (a book worth reading by itself). Nowhere on the cover, on the jacket, in the first hundred-plus pages is this fact telegraphed. It is not a "prequel", despite being set earlier in time. You don't need to read all of Time_Pressure; reading the history-of-the-world speech on page 192 (about a dozen pages) is enough. -- Felix Lee flee@gondor.psu.edu *!psuvax1!gondor!flee From rec.arts.sf.written Tue Oct 27 21:55:52 1992 Path: lysator.liu.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!news.sei.cmu.edu!drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu!cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!crabapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!ap1i+ Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: _Lady Slings the Booze_ (no spoilers) Message-ID: <8eulamO00gpI8w4kZK@andrew.cmu.edu> From: "Andrew C. Plotkin" Date: Sun, 25 Oct 1992 17:03:30 -0500 Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA Lines: 42 Just bought it, in hardback, with some trepidation. I am pleased to report that, IMHO, Spider's brain has recovered from whatever rot has been chewing on it the past few years. I thought _Callahan's Lady_ was rather dull, trite, and utterly caved in at the end; _LStB_ managed to take the same setting and create an interesting novel. (Note: novel, not collection of short stories. You could view this as two connected novellas if you wanted, but they're much more connected than Spider's previous works in the Callahan universe.) The characters had the same range of deus-ex-machina technology available to them as in _CL_, but it was presented much more rationally: useful, but with flaws and restrictions, and all presented *before* the final dust-up. Thus, it was science fiction, as opposed to weak fantasy. (Certain plot elements were slightly stretched, but they were stretched in order to make the story consistent, rather than to save the hero's asses.) The puns are thick and evil as ever. So are the obscure references (the sort where the narrator describes some famous personage by description only, and you're supposed to recognize him. I couldn't, most of the time. Sigh. (Although I was incredibly pleased by that guy on one crutch.)) The characters were up to Spider's usual standards (feel free to kill me if you think that's not a compliment. :-) The protagonist and his girlfriend(s) are new characters, but of course there are lots of people from earlier books, and scads of cameos. Interesting, dynamic, possibly too nice to be real -- but that's the whole point of Spider Robinson: if you don't think it's worthwhile trying *make* that real, you probably gave up his books ten years ago. Summary: It's no _Stardance_, but it's worth buying in hardcover. These opinions: Humble, mine. Warning: Please add spoiler warning if you follow up -- particularly if you give away puns, punchlines, or obscure references. (...and please do. I'm desperate to know who hired the protagonist at the very beginning of the book -- assuming it was anyone in the real world at all.) --Z "And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..." From new Thu Jun 16 18:53:44 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!trane.uninett.no!eunet.no!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!news.intercon.com!panix!not-for-mail From: hlavaty@panix.com (Arthur Hlavaty) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Review: Callahan's Date: 21 Mar 1994 13:28:47 -0500 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and Unix, NYC Lines: 64 Message-ID: <2mkp0v$9sk@panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] I feel a kind of ambivalent embarrassment every time a new Kurt Vonnegut book comes out, and I suspect that I am not alone. I remember that I not only enjoyed his earlier books as fiction, but even thought that he was a brilliant and perceptive thinker, and the shame creeps over me. Then I remind myself that the early books did have a lot to offer. They were genuinely and deliberately funny, and they did not promote the dumb ideas that one now associates with his name. In those days he was not saying that fiction writing is simply a form of lying, morally inferior to any sort of physical work, or that our species would be happier if only we weren't stuck with these terrible large brains that think all the time. Even his more recent work is not entirely devoid of merit. I'm starting to have similar feelings about Spider Robinson, to see him as the sort of wretched excess that I took seriously in the Sixties. It's unfair to him, but I don't think I am being entirely mistaken. In the Sixties, there were any number of books about how They (the Establishment) were uptight, repressive, narrow-minded, and invincibly ignorant, about sex in particular, but about all sorts of other things as well, but that We were free-thinking and open minded. In retrospect, the books were right about Them, but wrong about Us. The critique of sexual puritanism, for instance, was incisive (and, alas, not dated), but next to that we can see unexamined assumptions that now don't look a whole lot better than the obvious nonsense they were attacking. (In many cases, feminism offered an instant corrective.) Spider Robinson's writing is in that tradition. It shows up in perhaps its purest form in the Callahan's Bar stories. They are sf stories, often quite good as such. They are also representative of a particular sensibility, reminiscent of the Sixties, but updated to avoid some of that decade's less enlightened views, about women and gays for instance. And now, *Off the Wall at Callahan's* [Tor tpb] presents the ideas, in what purports to be the wit and wisdom of the denizens of Callahan's. Much of it is witty and wise, things like "Where I come from, anything that says, 'Excuse me' is considered human." Some is good, but strikes this particular reader as overly familiar. (Your mileage may vary.) But there's also stuff like: "Triads have a very short shelf life--unless all three members are ambisexual. For a heterosexual species with two sexes, odd numbers are unstable. If a commodity is scarce, competition for it will ensue. Triads are as interesting as hell--while they last. But so is a chimney fire." I picked this Horrible Example not because it's more categorical and dogmatic than others--it isn't--but because it is one that I know from my own experience to be a bunch of shit. I am a part of one of those nonexistent long-lasting het triads--going on seven years now and getting better all the time. We've had difficulties, as has every relationship involving more than one person, but Robinson's alleged diagnosis is relevant to almost none of them. If someone came into Callahan's and announced that there could not be any sort of good sexual/romantic relationship between two people with the same sort of genitalia, he would be scorned and pitied, and rightly so. Robinson's statement is less ignorant--there are fewer counterexamples and they are less publicized--but I don't think it is any less stupid. -- Arthur D. Hlavaty hlavaty@panix.com "The Mason's face is ajar."--Firesign Theater