Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille
By Steven Brust
3.5/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
Steven Brust's Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille is a time-traveling, science fiction thriller and a rollicking, fun read.
Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille serves the best matzoh ball soup in the Galaxy, and hires some of the best musicians you'll ever hear. It's a great place to visit, but it tends to move around—just one step ahead of whatever mysterious conspiracy is reducing whole worlds to radioactive ash. And Cowboy Feng's may be humanity's last hope for survival.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Steven Brust
STEVEN BRUST is the author of a number of bestselling fantasy novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Dzur and Tiassa. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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Reviews for Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille
161 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Is it classic when it gets re-read every few years? I dunno. Still, I don't read real ones, so its all the reality I get. Fine with me. Good SciFi.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I owned this book way back in the 90's when it first came out, the cover is amazing and I've never fully forgotten it even though I don't remember what happened to my original copy. I found it at a used book sellers recently and bought it again to reread. Oddly though, once I got past the first few chapters nothing seemed familiar about this book. A few more chapters in I realized that was because I never finished it. This book has a fascinating concept, somewhat interesting universe that it is set in and is boring as hell with some of the most uninteresting, fairly stupid characters I've read in a long time. It was a struggle to get through it and I normally don't continue reading books I don't like but I really wanted to see how this one ended. It wasn't worth it. The main character, the narrator, was uninteresting and not really likable and while important stuff was going on in the background we instead followed him as he looked for an apartment, had a date with an even more unlikable character, didn't want to talk about important things, did stupid things. Everything but deal with the main storyline and all the interesting things that were going on somewhere else. None of the characters acted all that intelligently, not even the super duper bad guys who couldn't seem to kill characters that weren't even trying to be safe. The ending was a serious let down with a twist that felt more like a cheat than any I've read in a long time and made the story make even less sense than it already had. Such a waste of an excellent concept. The cover art is still cool, I'll probably keep the book just for that. In fact, one of the stars I'm giving this book is for the concept and one is for the cover art.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5As it turns out, this book has a somewhat-interesting plot involving time travel and the deliberate destruction of Earth and other human-inhabited planets.
However, I doubt many readers will make it through the first hundred or so pages where nothing happens. Well, the characters hang out in the bar and grill, drink, smoke, play Irish music, and obsess about their love lives. The dour first person narration by “Billy” does nothing to develop the characters; they are just a list of names and whiskey preferences. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This was not your typical Stephen Brust novel. In fact, I've never read anything quite like this.
It's told in first person (with a few Intermezzos of third person to fill in the blanks) of a banjo player in a folk band named Billy. We meet Billy in Cowboy Feng's as he listens to his band mates tuning up for the evening gig. The gig is cut short by a nuclear explosion which catapults the bar through time and space to another planet. They were on Mars, prior to that on Venus, prior to that a lunar colony and original in London on Old Earth.
Eventually, we learn there is a war being fought between two factions of humanity. One faction is a society based on fear and ignorance, using a fatal disease (called Hag's disease) as a catalyst. This society uses the disease as an excuse to quarantine itself and destroy the rest of humanity to prevent the spread of infection. The small group of employees at Feng's bar and the band members who were accidentally (perhaps) sucked into the rebel cause, are trying to discover how to stop the extermination of billions of humans by the enemy.
The story was engaging, sometimes funny, sometimes violent and eventually reached a conclusion that was sacrificial but successful. It was an interesting read, but I'm not sure I would re-read it. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I am a big fan of Stephen Brust, but this was my first outing outside of his Taltos world. I struggled early on because he used, I beleive on purpose, a stumbling writing style, which built into the confusion the characters were feeling. He jumped from character to character with few clean references to who was who. I was deep into the story by the time I finally became comfortable with the cast. After that, I really became hooked by the mystery of the events and who was this enemy unseen. I was pleased with the ending.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I like a lot of Brust's stuff. I'm not fond of Dumas' style, but he even brought that off well - readably well - in several of his books. This was more like a cross between Spider Robinson's "Calahan's Cross Time Saloon" & the first (4th) Star Wars bar scene. It tried for comedy & fell flat for me. Most of it seemed pointless, but that's not too surprising. Humor is often difficult to write, especially for me. I didn't like Monty Python, either, so your mileage may vary.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This was recommended to me by the only person whose literary recommendations I wholeheartedly trust (we just seem to like and dislike exactly the same stuff) - and I was taken aback when, reading it, I didn't find it that wonderful. It was light and a quick read - I felt that the characters could have had more depth. But when I got to the end, I found I'd completely changed my mind.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Not my favorite of his - I prefer Vlad Taltos ("Jhereg", etc). However, to give credit where it's due, Steven Brust is one of only two authors that have ever floored me with a plot twist. (The other, BTW, was Diana Wynne Jones in "Archer's Goon".)
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5so not worth my moneyI had hopes of anything vaguely Douglas Adams, Spider Robinson, maybe even a little Philip K Dick, mixed in with a wee bit o' Terry Pratchett, but instead got some uninteresting characters in an interesting situation but never actually doing anything about or with it. I kept waiting. Hell, I waited through a dreary 142 pages without a bit of the ole space-faring nonsense I was lead to expect. Perhaps it picks up in the second half of the book, but I'll not wait around long enough to try to find out. Moving on.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A colorful, imaginative tale with memorable characters and some plot twists I perhaps should have seen coming but didn't. Highly readable.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meh. I don't know what I expected, but this wasn't it. Maybe, because of the title, I expected more comedy - kind of like 'Lady Slings the Booze' by Spider Robinson.The ending felt a little rushed and a little flat. Not horrible, just not particularly good.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bar that escapes from nuclear descructions of several worlds by moving in space and time. Interesting twist in the end.