owldark's Full Review: Spider Robinson - Callahan's Key
Dear Spider,
I wish i didn't have to say this, but i'm really disappointed in your latest book. Callahan's Key is not only not up to your previous standards, it's flat-out terrible. And it's even worse because of the height that it's fallen from: the previous Callahan books are simply amazing. It almost made me cry, i was so frustrated!
First of all, the plot, such as it is, meanders along -- it takes the characters most of the book just to change cities. The incidents along the way are sometimes entertaining, but often just not: when they get caught by the young punk police officer for smoking pot, and Jake uses his Finn-given invulnerability, for example. Huh? Since when have the Callahan crowd relied on invulnerability and "physical prowess" to solve problems? This all leads to them picking up the guy's partner and adding him to the Callahan crowd -- but he's so unmemorable i can't even remember his name.
Which leads me to another problem: the characterization. I have the aforementioned issue with the gang's supposedly awesome and very Callahanian real-estate agent; he almost completely slips my memory. Even Doc's wife, who ought to be pretty interesting, is almost completely cardboard.
Erin, the hyperintelligent baby, reads like a drooling handicapped adult -- not like a 14-month old. Being a baby has to be interesting in other ways, besides just not having motor control, and so Erin seemed completely unbelievable to me. She was just a very small carbon copy of her parents.
And even most of the returning characters are treated like nothings -- really, the only people who come through at all in the writing are Jake, Zoey, Erin, and occasionally Nikky, all important characters to be sure, but they so totally eclipse everyone else that it seems like the whole gang has had their personalities amputated!
And the main crisis, the whole "destruction of the universe" thing, is a pretty big story to be solved in the last, what, 50 pages of writing? And by some extremely trite, unbelievable, and badly written tricks. It took them 300 pages to get to Key West and only 50 to fix everything? You definitely had a pacing problem, among other things.
So whatever happened to the real Callahan's? You know, the place where people come together to be merry and to share pain, to help each other through the hard times and the good times, to love each other, and to save the world while they're at it? There's nary a sign of that place in this book.
Spider, i've heard from some people who saw you at cons while Key was in progress that it really was just a sort of "interim" book, designed to get the gang down to Key West. And boy, i hope so, because it does not stand on its own, and it does a horrible injustice to those of us who've known and loved the Callahan crowd for years!
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