Callahan's Con by Spider Robinson

I discovered a "new" thrift store the other day, and while browsing its treasures I came upon the only novel in Robinson's Callahan's series that I didn't previously own. For 89 cents, whaddaya gonna do?

Jake and his wife, Zoe, and their teleporting, time-traveling daughter, Erin, are enjoying life at Jake's Place in Key West, with many of their old friends living in the various bungalows that surround the place. Unfortunately, a couple of serpents invade their paradise - a bureaucrat form the state board of education who needs to determine if Erin's home schooling meets department standards, and a mobster called Little Tony Donuts, who is trying to run the old protection racket on Jake's pied a terre.

For Spider's old fans, this book will have plenty of everything that makes his work fun and entertaining - puns, spoonerisms, wordplay, shaggy dog stories, and all that jazz (literally, Jake & Fast Eddy do a couple of numbers). But it's not really breaking any new ground. If you've read the last few Jake's Place stories, you've read them all. Lots of Irish coffee, a couple of telepathic linkups, and a time-traveling teleporter seem to be able to solve any problem, and everyone gets to lay (literally) around the cabana once more. Glad I've got the complete set now, but it's just a can of lite beer compared to the single malt whiskey days at the old Crosstime Saloon.

User Friendly by Spider Robinson

 This book is a mixed bag of odds and ends from Robinson, with some short stories, some essays, and some raps that defy description. It's all typically Spider, but probably only of interest to serious fans. Many of the stories seem like they were a good beginning to a potential novel, and when they went nowhere, he blew the dust off them and had them published here.

In one essay about his mentors, Robinson says something with which I strongly identified:

"I was born, physically, in 1948. But I was born as a thinking being in early 1965, at age 6, when a librarian whose name I do not know gave me the first book I ever read all by myself, with no pictures in it. It was called Rocket Ship Galileo, the first of the books written especially for young people by the already legendary Robert Anson Heinlein, the first Grand-Master of Science Fiction."

Born a bit later, and already reading voraciously at age 11, my best friend handed me a copy of Glory Road, by Robert Anson Heinlein, and it started me on a journey which continues to this day.

Robinson has had, for many years now, a central theme in his stories. It's the belief that if we all became addicted to truth rather than lies, to giving each other love rather than hurting one another, and if all communication were as open and honest as telepathy, all the world's ills would go away. It's a lovely vision, and it's nice to visit it in Spider's stories once in a while.

Despite that, he does have a snarky little cynical streak he lets loose every now and then, and it's especially apparent in one of his essays which contains predictions about the future.

"When you can afford a TV linkup that offers you 245 channels in 3-D with digital stereo sound, there won't be a damn thing worth watching on any of them."

Nailed it - in 1990.

Telempath by Spider Robinson

Telempath is a pretty fair post-apocalyptic novel by Robinson. The premise is that a scientist, angered by the way humans have polluted the environment, releases a plague which gives people a sense of smell exponentially better than that of wolves, and most humans are driven mad by the odors of technology. Cities are rapidly depopulated, and many flee to the wilderness areas; even there they still need nose filters to tone down the extreme aromas. Ok, the usual suspects - Man bad, Nature good.

The plight of the survivors is further complicated by the appearance of the Muskies, plasmoid beings which attack humans for inexplicable (at the start of the book) reasons, and which men, with their improved sense of smell, can now detect at small arms range distances. The people of Fresh Start use pyrotechnic ammunition to explode the Muskies, as they are explosively flammable.

One of the scientist's former colleagues, Jacob Stone, founds a small enclave in upstate New York, Fresh Start, where he and some other refugees bring back a small amount of modern technology, mostly medical or weapons to defend against human and animal predators. The story begins when his son, Isham, is sent into New York City to find and execute the man responsible, Wendell Carlson. What Isham discovers in the city rattles his entire worldview, and he returns to his home a changed man, his vengeance redirected.

There's also an opposition group in the woods, called the Agros, led by a man named Jordan, who are most violently opposed to all technology, and who worship Pan. The main crisis point in the novel is reached when they kidnap Isham, and band together in force to destroy Fresh Start and all vestiges of its industry.

Once again, Robinson returns to a recurring them. If we can all only just get our minds right, and find common ground with ALL of our enemies through telepathy, empathy or telempathy, we can all live in peace with each other and with the Earth. Isham displays hitherto unsuspected abilities in that area, and - wonder of wonders - so does his love interest. Together, their love can conquer all.

Good for a couple hours diversion, anyway.

Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson

Melancholy Elephants is a collection of Spider's short stories, mostly reprinted from his earlier collection, Antinomy. The title story is a cautionary tale about the dangers of legislating eternal copyrights for creators. The premise is that there are a finite number of stories that can be told, or melodies composed, and that when those are all used up, the human race could suffer from fatal depression. There's several tongue-in-cheek time travel stories, Half an Oaf, Chronic Offender and Father Paradox.

Robinson also includes a in-joke type of story for all you Beatles fans out there, Rubber Soul, about John Lennon being resurrected someday. High Infidelity, a story about one human aspect of brain transplant technology, contains some rather racy scenes. Spider also returns to a theme he finds fascinating in Satan's Children. An Abby Hoffman-like figure creates a drug that is the ultimate truth serum. What happens to the world when it is widely dispersed becomes another singularity event. From that tale,

"Even those of us who pay only lip service to the truth know what it is, deep down in our hearts. And we all believe in it, and know it when we see it. Even the best rationalization can fool only the surface mind that manufactures it; there is something beneath, call it the heart or the conscience, that knows better. It tenses up like a stiff neck muscle when you lie, in proportion to the size of the lie, and if it stiffens enough it can kill you for revenge...Most people seem to me, in my cynical moments, to keep things stabilized at about the discomfort of a dislocated shoulder or a tooth about to abscess. They trade honesty off in small chunks for pleasurem and wonder that their lives hold so little joy."

Robinson occasionally approaches truth in his writing, and this books is a joy to read, for the most part.

Mindkiller by Spider Robinson

Once again, as in Stardance, Robinson has returned to the scene of the crime and fleshed out a short story to create a full length novel. To be quite honest with you all, I don't think Robinson really has "the chops" to write a full length novel from scratch - each of his novels ends up being a loosely connected collection of episodic short stories, to some extent. Not that he's not enormously entertaining and talented at those, but the long form is not his strength.

There are two main threads to the story; two protagonists. The first, whom we met in the short story, Mindkiller, is Joe the burglar. Joe is pretty much the ghost in the machine. He has no past, no official existence, and no recollection of who he is or how he ended up in residence in a luxurious hidden bunker with state of the art computer systems, tailor made, it seems, for someone like him to fly under the radar, supporting himself by burgling the wealthy. Joe makes a decision to meddle in some one's life when he rescues Karen, a hooker, from slow suicide by "wireheading". Wireheads are folks who have had a device surgically implanted in their brains which directly stimulates the pleasure center. Such stimulus is highly addictive, and wireheads will go without eating, drinking, sleeping, or even moving as long as the current keeps flowing.

The other protagonist is Norman Kent, a mild-mannered, somewhat hapless professor of literature in Nova Scotia. His wife has left him for a young plumber, his career is stalled out, and we meet him when he is standing on a bridge, ready to kill himself with a plunge to the icy waters below. The incongruous desire to save his hat, when it is blown off his head, results in aborting his suicide, and he returns to his apartment to find his long-lost sister, Madeleine, awaiting him there after her long sojourn in Europe. There's some sorrow buried in Maddie's past, too, which she won't reveal, but she stays with Norman for a while, helping him get his head back together, until she is abducted without a trace while walking home from a party late at night. Norman's search for his sister is fruitless, and he eventually appears to give up hope of finding out what happens to her, and begins to get serious about his teaching career again.

The "link" between the two men appears to be two technologies that are also linked: the ability to directly stimulate the pleasure center of the brain, and the technology to allow memories to be deleted or edited from the brain, which turn out, through the course of both men's investigations, to be owned and controlled by a single entity, whom Robinson calls, later in the book, The Mindkiller. Both men indulge in quixotic quests to surprise and neutralize the villain, and the results provide some twisty plot fun in this novel.

In the end, however, it boils down to Robinson's favorite idea; that if only mankind could get into each other's head in some way - usually telepathically, but in this case by recording one person's memories and imprinting them upon others, war, poverty, hunger and all evil will disappear from the world. A good example would be to imprint the memories of a modern farmer, with everything he knows about proper planting, fertilization and irrigation techniques, into the mind of a peasant farmer in the third world, or if a KKK member could experience exactly what it's like to be a persecuted minority.

Great concept, and obviously the technology is too dangerous to turn over to any particular country or government, lest it be abused, hence the conspiracy to keep the knowledge tightly held until it is fully developed and can be revealed to the entire world, free to all. I still see some logistical problems, but perhaps it could do some good - minor shades of this in real world things like the OLPC project, and efforts to bring "micro" water treatment facilities to third world countries, and with vertical farming, etc.

One thing I found amusing was a paragraph in the last chapter:

"...the man who pulls the President's strings, dear. For decades now, it has been impossible for a man suited to that power to be elected. Stevenson was the last to try. The rest of them accepted the inevitable and worked through electable figureheads. There hasn't been a president since Johnson who wasn't a ventriloquist's dummy. Some of them never knew it. The present incumbent, as a matter of fact, has no idea that his is owned and operated by a mathematician from Butler, Missouri."

There's just so much that's fun in that bit. The rest of the book is pretty fun, too.

Stardance by Spider Robinson

While re-reading Stardance, which I'd call one of the true classics of modern SF, I thought about a couple of other great books in that category: Ender's Game by Card and The Forever War by Haldeman. It came to me that all three of these books have something in common - they're about humanity's first encounter with aliens. In Stardance, we appear to achieve peaceful relations, but in the other two, it ends in war. Could it be because Robinson's aliens are great glowing firefly-like balls, while Card's and Haldeman's are just icky bugs?

Charlie Armstead is a former dancer, turned video man after a burglar's bullet messed up his hip. He is introduced to Shara Drummond, possibly the most talented dancer of her time, by her sister, Norrey, who hopes that Charlie can break the news to her gently that she can never make it as a professional dancer; not because she doesn't have talent, but because she is simply the wrong body type, statuesque and womanly rather than small and cadaverous. Together they embark upon a hopeless quest, to make marketable videos of her innovative dance ideas. Unfortunately, it is not to be, and they give it up as hopeless at last, much as Charlie gives up on his hopeless unrequited passion for Shara, herself.

Some time later, Shara contacts him again, and asks him to come to SpaceFac, an orbital station, to film her as she develops the first zero gee dances. She has become the kept woman of the owner of the facility, Bryce Carrington, the stereotypical heartless businessman every good story needs. When Shara's physiology becomes almost irrevocably adapted to space, Carrington exiles her back to Earth, as he doesn't want the bad publicity that would come from allowing her to die. On the way home, however, Charlie and Shara's ship is drawn into the first encounter with an alien race, luminous balls of plasma. Shara observes that they seem to be dancing, and insists that she alone can learn to communicate with them. She figuratively dances her heart out, and drives the aliens away from Earth, which they intend to invade, evidently, then jets into a decaying orbit and burns up in the atmosphere, like a shooting star.

End part one. I think this was the original novella that Robinson published.

The story, which to my knowledge is the first ever published that seriously considered that dance might be the way to "talk" to our first alien race encountered,  is helped immensely by the collaboration of Spider's wife, Jeanne, who was a professional dancer. Passages like,

"Dancers speak of their 'center,' the place their motion centers around often quite near the physical center of gravity. You strive to 'dance from your center,' and the 'contraction-and-release' idea which underlies so much of Modern dance depends upon the center for its focus of energy. Shara's center seemed to move about the room under its own power, trailing limbs that attached to it by choice rather than necessity."

and,
"And the new dance said, 'This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving - and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp...It said all this with a soaring series of cyclical movements that held all the rolling majesty of grand symphony, as uniquely different from each other as snowflakes, and as similar. And the new dance laughed, as much at tomorrow as at yesterday, and most of all at today."

In the next part of the story, Charlie has inherited the rights to the videotapes of the Stardance, Shara's legacy, and has been written a blank check, basically, to form a zero gee dance company. He approaches Norrey and the two of them finally admit that they love each other, marry, and head for the space station to build a dream together.

One anachronism I noticed in the story, which was written in 1979, was that he mentions that a Beatles reunion took place. John Lennon was murdered after the book was published, so the reunion only takes place in Robinson's alternate future.

There's a metaphor about life from Zelazny's Isle of the Dead that I've used quite often, how life is like Tokyo Bay. Robinson comes up with an interesting metaphor in Stardance:

"Picture us all as being in free fall, all of us that are alive. LIterally falling freely, at one gee, down a tube so unimaginably long that its ultimate bottom cannot be seen. The vast tube is studded with occasional obstacles - and the law of averages says that at some finite future time you will smash into one: you will die. There are literally billions of us in this tube, all falling, all sure to hit some day; we caro off each other all the time, whirling more or less at random in and out of lives and groups of lives. MOst of us construct belief structures which deny either the falling or the obstacles, and place them underneath our feet like skateboards. A good rider can stay on for a lifetime.

Occasionally you reach out and take a stranger's hand, and fall together for a while. It's not so bad, then. Sometimes if you're really desperate with fear, you clutch someone like a drowning man clinging to an anchor, or you strive hopelessly to reach someone in a different trajectory, someone you can't possibly reach, just to be doing something to forget that your death is rushing up toward you."

Powerful.

When the aliens reappear out near Saturn, Charlie's dancers are recruited to go find out what they want this time. Robinson sort of cheats on the long journey to Saturn (which takes a year in story time) by describing one typical day, then skipping over all the other days, saying they were much the same.

A good description of the "there are two kinds of people" meme that Spider uses goes like this:

"That had been the real root of our struggle with the diplomats over the last year. They were committed to the belief that what would be understood best by the aliens was precise adherence to a series of computer-generated movements. We Stardancers unanimously believed that what the aliens had responded to in Shara had been not a series of movements but art."

Yeah, there are those people who get dance - as art, and those who merely see the movements.

Spider was one of the SF authors whom I encountered early in my reading who first introduced me to the concept of the singularity - the concept that at some point mankind would reach a point in their evolution where the entire paradigm would shift, and all of our earlier history would become irrelevant. He once again visits this theme in Stardance, not merely with a telepathic group hug, but with the idea that mankind will be fundamentally changed and inherit the universe. A classic definitely worth keeping on your shelf, folks.

Callahan's Secret by Spider Robinson

Callahan's Secret appears to have been Robinson's attempt, like Doyle's in The Reichenbach Falls (which he mentions) to put the series to bed at last. I was saddened at the time, but when the inevitable financial pressures got to Spider's web... One a personal note, one of the stories has a bunch of Princes Bride references, and I believe that when I first read this book was when I was motivated to hunt high and low for a copy of the book. Of course, by now everyone in the galaxy has seen the movie.

There are only four stories in this collection, though they are lengthier than the stories in earlier collections. The first, The Blacksmith's Tale (a nod to Chaucer?) tells how Jake meets Callahan's daughter, Mary, and falls hopelessly in love with her (a theme that reappears every so often in Robinson's novels), but she gets introduced to Mickey Finn, and it's love at first sight for her, leaving Jake in the cold, so to speak. We finally get the rest of the story on Finn, which leads us to the climactic story at the end of this book. There's a throwaway line in this one about Mary's mother being Lady Sally, madame of the finest whorehouse in the area, which leads to later Robinson stories about Lady Sally's.

Pyotr's Story is actually almost an urban fantasy bit, long before the genre became so overwhelming. Where would a vampire who became an alcoholic long ago hang out? At Callahan's Saloon, of course, and his ability to filter out alcohol from the patrons' bloodstreams has helped alleviate many a hangover.

Involuntary Man's Laughter comes up with a novel solution (in an era when PCs, laptops and smart phones were either nonexistent or very very rare) to befriending a person who suffers from severely socially debilitating diseases, and including him in Callahan's magic.

The Mick of Time is the story of what happens when the alien race whom Finn once served finally shows up to find out what became of their missing spy/slave. What do you do when an irresistible force encounters and immovable object like Mike Callahan. The solution in part lies in all of the patrons of Callahan's achieving a telepathic gestalt (another them that turns up often in Robinson's works). Robinson introduces a suitcase nuke - it seems like this is long before I'd heard of them in other types of literature or media - to save the day, and incidentally destroy the bar.

Oh, no need to shed any tears, you know it's getting resurrected.

Time Travelers Strictly Cash by Spider Robinson

This is almost a sequel to Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, Robinson's earlier collection of shorts about a marvelous and magical bar, but Spider was under the gun to produce a contracted number of words and didn't have enough Callahan's stories on hand, so he includes some of his other short fiction an essay or two, and a rave about Robert A. Heinlein. You'll get a little respite from the puns and a slightly broader view of his works. I really really need to review Stardance one of these days.

There's a story about someone who has "fivesight" an interesting twist on precognition. When the person with fivesight sees a disaster coming, they can't try to prevent it, it only makes it worse (sorta like the law of conservation of pain), but they are allowed to make some minor preparations to reduce the damage a bit. What do you do when you can see lightning about to strike in your life, and how do you stay sane when you can't stop it?

There's a wonderful little surprise ending in God is an Iron, which is the story that Robinson later turned into the novel, Mindkiller. It's possible in his future world to plug yourself directly into the wall socket and stimulate the pleasure center of the brain, and it's a lovely way to suicide, if you make the right preparations. Suicide may be painless, but it still seems to leave a mess for someone, even an innocent bystander, to clean up.

The only story that falls a little flat, for me, is Serpent's Teeth, Robinson's sole attempt at fantasy, for good reason.

The essay, Rah, Rah, R.A.H.!, was probably the first time I ever heard anyone express so eloquently what was wonderful about Heinlein, back when this book was published. I've been a big fan since I first read Glory Road, and have kept on being a fan long past the passing of the Master. Robinson does a marvelous job of defending Heinlein and his works against those who accused him of various perfidies such as fascism, militarism, and misogyny. I recently watched a documentary about Heinlein, where they blathered on about what Heinlein's stories were REALLY all about, and I gotta say that people, especially egghead intellectuals in the art and film world, have no clue what Heinlein really meant to say about ANYTHING.

Some great reading material here. Robinson is truly one of the most droll authors around.

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson

It's difficult to believe that I've never posted any reviews of Spider Robinson's work on this blog before now. I guess it's partially because most of his works that I read were first published in the 70s or 80s. I had an urge the other day, when I was headed to the mountains for some R&R, to take along a couple of Spiders' short story collections.

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon is his first collection of the Callahan's stories, which were for the most part published in Analog magazine when Ben Bova was editor. They're not always exactly science fiction (which caused some complaints from diehard Analog readers), but they're nearly  always just exactly Spider Robinson, at his most amusing.

Callahan's is a bar, run by Mike Callahan, where those who need its solace the most are somehow drawn in, as if by some gravitic force. All drinks are exactly 50 cents, but if you put a dollar in the box on top of the bar, you are encouraged to utter a toast, and hurl your glass into the fireplace - which is often cathartic or leads to a story. The patrons of the bar are almost supernaturally supportive, and many hearts get healed there.

The opening story, The Guy with the Eyes, steals a page from Heinlein, one of Robinson's greatest heroes, in that the being who is uttering a toast, Michael (another similarity to RAH) Finn, is an advance scout for a race of powerful, one might say "evil" galactic overlords (Valentine Michael Smith suspects he is a spy for the Old Ones of Mars in Stranger for a Strange Land, sent to determine whether Earth needs to be destroyed like the Fifth Planet once was), who are ready to turn Earth into their own meat locker.

If you don't like puns, I'd suggest you find your entertainment elsewhere, however. The first night of the week at Callahan's is Punday, not Monday, and there is enormous competition to come up with the worst stinker. Tuesday is Tall Tales night, and you'll find only the shaggiest of dogs at Callahan's.

Robinson, like his hero RAH, anticipates a later invention in one of his stories (probably more than that, but this one I noticed on most recent reading) - music videos. This was long before MTV, but in The Law of the Conservation of Pain, a time traveler from the future who is trying to avert the suicide of a Janis Joplin-like singer brings back a globe that projects the music and accompanying video, showing the Callahan's regulars why she must be saved. We are living in the future I used to read about.

The tag-line of that story borrows once again from Heinlein. "Shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased." Robinson postulates that there's a certain amount of pain in the universe, and it can't be thwarted, it will just turn up somewhere else, in some other form. However, like matter and energy, pain can be converted to joy.