Subject: Review: Callahan's

From: [email-masked] (Arthur Hlavaty)
Date: 21 Mar 1994 13:28:47 -0500

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           [email-masked]
"The Mason's face is ajar."--Firesign Theater