Callahan's Saloon
Email
Staff
Message
Board
Chat
Directory
Welcome to
Callahan's

User Friendly

ISBN 0-671-87864-6
A Review by QRS


Traveling on I-70 from Ohio to Missouri in the jumpseat of an old non-air conditioned box truck with nothing to do can make you think. By 19th Century Standards, I'm in a science fiction work. A small truck moving faster than any train of the time, surrounded by gasoline-driven compressors &pumps & generators, portable computers, remote video cameras and recorders, hand-held mobile telephones, global positioning systems, environmental suits, an underwater robot - what would Verne think!?

With that in mind, I read "User Friendly" by Spider Robinson.

"User Friendly" is a collection of Spider Robinson short works with all of his strengths and defects. He's great at introducing science fiction ideas into the here and now. His use of mechanical details come into play, as a particular car, medicine or weapon is lovingly described, then used to help make the setting realistic. It would be nice, though, if his characters could have been given a similar amount of detail.

While I thought the essays were uneven, I enjoyed the raps, beat pros-etry discussing various science fiction authors in the style of Lord Buckley. These prose-poetry mixes offered a nice changup, and showed some techncal originality. If not something I'd like to read everyday, it was a nice bit of original writing.

The odd thing is that I thought the traditional science fiction stories fall flat. The futuristic works collapse into long dialogues and philosophising with weak endings. The exception is "When No Man Pursueth", a nice Jeffery Archer-type tale where a hero wannabe makes a bunch of mistakes, but ends up doing good anyway.

In short, "User Friendly", will provide a fix for Spider Robinson junkies, annoy lovers of "rockets and Martians" sci-fi, and entertain those who like moderately intellectual fiction with fantasy elements.


Book Reviews - Spider Bytes - Callahan's Saloon