Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille by Steven Brust

[james_davis_nicoll]

Cowboy Feng’s offers good food, excellent music, and, oh yes, refuge from the end of the world. Or rather, from the ends of several worlds.

Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille by Steven Brust

Comments

[ba_munronoe]

Is that a plague-type doctor (with a beaked mask) in the upper right corner?

It's got a fancy back cover too: https://www.amazon.com/Cowboy-Fengs-Space-Bar-Grille/dp/0765306646

I miss SF with elaborate book covers.

[bunsen_h]

I think you're right about the plague doctor. It's possible to see the detail more clearly in the expanded image visible if one follows that link.

[nocowardsoul]

A dud, but one of the two-page flashbacks is one of my favorite fictional depictions of bad parenting.

[elusis]

I read this hoping it would be similar to the Callahan's books.

It was not.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

Is that a bad thing?

[elusis]

It... is a thing.

[patrick_morris_miller]

For those not versed in the culture of the era: "Hags" (as well as the pancakes and flounder gag) is taken from a sick joke wherein it stands for "herpes + AIDS + gonorrhea + syphilis". Good fun, laughs are had by all.

[kathmandu]

I had not realized that. I just about picked up on the fear-and-desperation to isolate any possible source of Hags Disease as being an allegory for AIDS.

Do I want to know what pancakes and flounder have to do with any of that?

[patrick_morris_miller]

If you have Hags disease, hopefully you like pancakes and flounder because you'll only be eating food that can be slipped under your door.

[estrevan]

Okay that’s actually pretty funny. At least to me, remembering the AIDS hysteria of the 80s

[heuradys]

Every character is based on or bears a physical resemblance to one of his friends at the time, so it's pretty much an Easter basket if you know who's who.

[(Anonymous)]

I remember reading this, I couldn't recap the plot to save my life. I remember thinking I wanted to enjoy this book a lot more than I actually did.

Teka Lynn

[jbwoodford]

I remember kind-of liking this when I first read it; not sure how well it would hold up to a reread, though.

Looking back, this is one of several books of his (including _To Reign in Hell_, _Brokedown Palace_, _The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars_, mostly) that I see as Brust basically saying hey, the Jhereg books are a cash cow that will hopefully last me for a few decades, and that gives me the chance to mess around. Some of these efforts were more popular than others--he's gotten a lot of mileage out of writing like Dumas, e.g. It also seems to me that having seen what worked and what didn't in those more experimental novels, he's been able to do some interesting stylistic things with the later Jhereg books.

[chrysostom]

Yeah, the Vlad novels have done a lot of interesting things over the course of the series. In a way that, say, the Stainless Steel Rat novels did not.

[bunsen_h]

I seem to recall seeing or hearing a conversation (con panel?) with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, in which someone questioned Tor's publication of stuff like Piers Anthony's Xanth novels. Patrick replied that they were tremendously commercially successful, and that the revenue permitted Tor to publish other books that were extremely well written but might not be commercial successes.

[jbwoodford]

Something similar happened to Donald Wollheim the year he was GoH at WisCon--he was asked why he continued to publish the Gor novels, and he replied that they sold well enough that he had the money to publish Jo Clayton, CJ Cherryh, Doris Piserchia, et al.