Callahan's Legacy

For years, Callahan's was the place where friends met to have a few drinks, tell a few jokes, and occasionally save the world. Until that unfortunate incident with the nuke a few years ago....

But Jake Stonebender and his wife have opened a new Callahan's, Mary's Place, and all the regulars are there: Doc Webster, Fast Eddie the piano player, Long Drink McGonnigle, and of course the usual talking dogs, alcoholic vampires, aliens, and time travelers. Songs will be sung, drinks will be drunk (and drunks will have drinks), puns will be swapped...and as a three-eyed, three-legged, three-armed, three-everythinged alien flashes through space toward the bar, it just might be time to save the world again....

Kirkus Reviews

First novel-sized entry in Robinson's series of tall stories (the first collection appeared in 1976) about Callahan's Bar (Callahan's Lady, 1989, etc.). Though the original Callahan's is gone, the tradition continues—alcohol-lubricated jokes, puns, histrionics and all—at Mary's Place, where Callahan's daughter, Mary, and her husband, the retired alien assassin Mickey Finn, preside, and proprietor/bartender Jake Stonebender's partner, Zoey Berkowitz, is an uncomfortable nine and a half months pregnant. The patrons include: Naggeneen, an Irish psi-powered leprechaun; the probability-bending Lucky Duck; Ralph von Wau Wau the taking dog; Solace the Artificial Intelligence; and various aliens, machines, and reconstituted personalities, such as the scientist Nikola Tesla. Even the time-traveling Mike Callahan himself shows up, to warn the company of an impending alien invasion by a three-eyed, three-legged purple cyborg Lizard. So as Jake pours drinks and coffee with a liberal hand, and Zoey at last gives birth, the assembly must figure out how to defeat the invader. After, that is, the bar's roof has been ripped off by a tornado, only to be replaced moments later by another, better roof—it's that sort of place.

A riot for Callahan addicts; newcomers may find it to be an acquired taste.

Spider Robinson, winner of three Hugos and a Nebula, was born in the Bronx and raised on Long Island, and has been a Canadian resident for 30 years. Holder of a bachelor's degree in English from the State University of New York, he worked as a folksinger and journalist before publishing his first story in Analog in 1973. He now lives with his wife Jeanne Robinson (co-author of the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Stardance trilogy) on an island outside Vancouver, B.C., where they raise and exhibit hopes.

Eleven of his 31 books are set in Callahan's Place, a fabulous tavern founded by a time traveler, where puns flow as freely as beer, and smell far worse. The most recent is Callahan's Con [Tor July 2003]. He has contributed a regular editorial column, "Future Tense," to Canada's national newspaper, The Globe & Mail, since 1995. In 2000, he released Belaboring the Obvious, a CD of original music with the legendary Amos Garrett ("Midnight at the Oasis") on lead guitar, and in 2001 he was a celebrity judge at the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam.