Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grill

All good books are based on characters. No matter how good or bad the plot, if the characters aren't well developed and interesting, the book sucks. This book has great characters, fairly archetypal, but still well rounded and interesting. As with all Brust books, this a mystery in the Arthur Conan Doyle/Sherlock Holmes style. Whether set in a fantasy or SciFi, the setting is just local color to flavor the meat of the book - solving the mystery. This is one of those books I re-read about once a year. I always pick up something new each time I read it. The first time you read it, you might find it hard to keep up with all the characcters (four who work for the bar, four who live in the bar, and four ~bad guys.) With all mystery books, it's a fun read to see who dun it and why - it's not about defining the bad aspects of society who drove some charcters into the story line (although this IS explained...) I'd recommend this or any Taltos book to anyone - regardless of if you read SciFi/Fantasy or not (I usually don't...) His local color is amazing - refined to the level of Twain or O Henry. The only downside is Brust clear obsession with hungarian cooking, as he pretty much lists each and every meal the charcters have in minute detail. This part gets on my nerves, but I'm not a foodie, so that's a big reason - but regardless, it's not annoying enough to spoil the yarn Brust spins. This book would make a GREAT movie.

This book just blew me away. When I read it i had no idea that the same author who wrote the Vlad Taltos series that I loved had anything to do with this book. Each time I read it I find myself being drawn further into the sad, exciting, and beautiful mind of our hero, Cowboy Feng... not to give anything away. When I say hero, i mean it with a capital H. Out to preserve humanity, and music and good cooking all together, and a hippie besides! The book is a semi cronological set of occurences that are interspersed with brief moments from the pasts of the leading characters, concealing a frightening plot point which remains unimportant until the last paragraph of the book. I say unimportant because the book is really about its characters. Its about love and faith and dealing and accepting and not accepting the inevitable even when it is fate. Its also about falling in love and the secret about the importance of what can be done with a goat. It puts paranoia in its place. In todays world it is extremely relevant, and more people should read it. While a very brief read, it is very worthwhile. Over the number of years since I first found it in my high school library, I went out and found it, bought it, and read it about once a year. It is not a long book, and not a sophisticated book in the conventional sense, but somehow it just keeps getting better and better. Every time I read it I fall in love with the title character again. This book has high marks on my personal list of classics of the 20th century. I think every child should read it. 'Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille' is a time travel tragedy of epic porportions.

I love this book! I can't believe it's out of print! I've taken to stockpiling Brust novels; they seem to come and go...The timeshifts--both literal and Faulknerian--keep this book fast and exciting. I love the casual descriptions of how the worlds change farther from Earth, the crack about how Star Trek still exists several centuries later, the really creepy ideas about irrational fear of AIDS, and, of course, the mystery of Who Is Cowboy Feng????? Brust nails the details (just like in the Vlad books, whose timeline is so well worked out that the first books refers to events that aren't explained for years), giving subtle hints about Sugar Bear and Cowboy Feng, so that when he does finally tell us, the resolution is incredibly satisfying, like being shown pieces of a jigsaw puzzle one at a time before finally seeing the whole.

I'm reviewing this to balance the one and two star reviews. This is only my second Brust book, and I enjoyed it a lot. I got it for its cover that reminded me of Robinson's Callahan books. There are similarities. Both have a lot of humor, both are out to save the universe with who finds their way to the bar, both are both "little" and "big" stories.But Brust's is a novel and is able to give more time to character development, not just to the musicians, as one reviewer put it, but everyone who is part of the story. The intermezzos between chapters describing how characters got from here to there were fascinating. Brust also has an interesting plot device. I recommend it, and I'd drink there in a flash. (And hear great Irish music!)

Steven Brust is one of my favorite writers, and unfortunately not nearly enough people know about him.Since I have yet to get my hands on a copy of To Reign in Hell this is my absolutely favorite of all his works.