James Nicoll Reviews

Steven Brust’s 1990 Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

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.

Feng’s first venue was in London. The next was on the Moon, in Imbrium City. After that, Jerrysport, Mars. Now, Feng’s is in New Quebec on Laurier. The means by which the bar hops from planet to planet (and era to era) is unknown. The trigger is always the same: nuclear attack.

Feng’s sojourn in New Quebec provides Billy Kevely and the rest of the Feng’s staff with something that Jerrysport did not: sufficient time to research the contexts of the nuclear attacks that triggered relocation. The news is grim. There have been five nuclear wars, on Earth, the Moon, Venus, Mars, and Galway around Proxima. All of them were planet-sterilizing events.

More puzzling, the cause of the wars seems inexplicable. Rather than escalating international tensions, the conflicts appear to come out of the blue. Only the apparent coincidence that space travel is always just developed enough for refugees to flee to new worlds has preserved the human species.

Are humans insane, compelled to nuke themselves into oblivion as soon as the means are handy? Or is some dark conspiracy at work, annihilating worlds for reasons that are unclear? The evidence suggests the second hypothesis.

The evidence also suggests that Feng’s is somehow tied to an effort to reveal the identity of the villains and put an end to their genocidal campaign. There’s some mysterious force that relocates Feng’s from doomed world to doomed world. The players on the other side clearly believe Feng’s is significant. Why else are assassins trying to murder Billy and his co-workers?

Not that the killers have much time in which to work. Laurier is targeted for planetary death and nothing the staff at Feng’s does can alter that.

~oOo~

I should probably schedule a review of a Brust I liked, so that I don’t come across as some sort of Brust-novel-hater.

But, first! Let’s talk about ads. Or rather one ad in the back of this 1990 mass market paperback.

1990 is about a generation after New Wave SF’s heyday. In any case, the books listed aren’t New Wave (either the UK New Wave or the US New Wave). They’re cyberpunk novels. I’m baffled. Was the cyberpunk label considered passe by 1990? Is the New Wave referenced here not the long-vanished spec-fic genre but the music genre? New wave music was only slightly younger than New Wave SF and by 1990 just as dead.

Feng’s isn’t cyberpunk or New Wave. In fact, as a member of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship, Brust seems a poor bet for New Wave leanings. What Feng’s is, at least in part, is an expression of the author’s disgust at how society treated people with HIV/AIDS.

Unmentioned above is the seeming minor background detail of an unpleasant, mildly contagious, invariably fatal disease called Hags. It’s not a minor detail, as it turns out. Brust draws here from real life: while nobody tried nuking HIV/AIDs into oblivion, some egregious solutions were proposed, including concentration camps. Persons with AIDs were pariahs, and their deaths celebrated by just the sort of people you’d expect.

Another entirely believable element: the Big Bads are xenophobic oligarchs. Well, they’d have to be. Nobody with a warm regard for humanity as a whole would repeatedly nuke whole worlds, and poor xenophobes wouldn’t be able to afford space colonies.

Unfortunately, while the cause is just, and the big bad’s motivation plausible, the novel is a dud in pretty much every way it could be a dud¹. None of the characters are particularly compelling. The big mystery of who is behind the nuclear attacks turns out to be something easily revealed with a bit of research. The unstoppable conspiracy that spanned space and time can sterilize whole planets, but whacking a bar full of folk musicians proves a bridge too far. In fact, saving humanity and confounding the bad guys turns out to be, in the words of Ryan George’s pitch-meeting YouTube series, ​“super easy, barely an inconvenience².”

Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille is available here (Orb), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Mighty pronouncements on my part that this book or that book was a dud are often followed by an exceedingly bitter recitation of all the awards for which this book or that book was nominated. Not in this case.

Digging deeper, I was astounded to see how short Brust’s list of award nominations is. I see only one non-Locus final ballot entry: his 1999 Nebula nomination for ​“When the Bow Breaks.” Sure, this particular novel wasn’t great but Brust has written solid material better than other authors’ works that did make it onto finalist lists.

2: Except for the billions of people who died on Earth, the Moon, Venus, Mars, Galway, and Laurier.