Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille

From Publishers Weekly
Brust's ( Jhereg ) dynamic, inventive style makes this time-hopping, intergalactic thriller a better book than its plot initially suggests. For all the frills and furbelows--and there are many, each more bizarre than the next--the central conflict is humdrum: a fiendish paranoiac called the Physician decides to destroy his native planet in order to stop the spread of a deadly illness called Hags disease. An unlikely group of heroes goes to work to foil the madman's apocalyptic plans. These white knights double as the house band at Feng's, a bar and grill that features Jewish cooking, a dance floor and--when it takes a direct hit from an atomic warhead--a neat little trick enabling travel through time and space. The often poignant musical allusions as well as the deftly sketched cronies at Feng's contribute to the book's surprisingly subtle depth of feeling. Brust's fantasy landscape seems truer than the backdrops of many realistic novels. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
“Consummate grace and genuine artistry.” —Roger Zelazny

“Steven Brust just might be America’s best fantasy writer.” —Tad Williams



Review
“Consummate grace and genuine artistry.” —Roger Zelazny

“Steven Brust just might be America’s best fantasy writer.” —Tad Williams



Book Description
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.



About the Author
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and raised in a family of Hungarian labor organizers, Steven Brust worked as a musician and a computer programmer before coming to prominence as a writer in 1983 with Jhereg, the first of his novels about Vlad Taltos, a human professional assassin in a world dominated by long-lived, magically-empowered human-like "Dragaerans."

Over the next several years, several more "Taltos" novels followed, interspersed with other work, including To Reign in Hell, a fantasy re-working of Milton's war in Heaven; The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, a contemporary fantasy based on Hungarian folktales; and a science fiction novel, Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille. The most recent "Taltos" novels are Dragon and Issola. In 1991, with The Phoenix Guards, Brust began another series, set a thousand years earlier than the Taltos books; its sequels are Five Hundred Years After and the three volumes of "The Viscount of Adrilankha": The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black, and Sethra Lavode.

While writing, Brust has continued to work as a musician, playing drums for the legendary band Cats Laughing and recording an album of his own work, A Rose for Iconoclastes. He lives in Las Vegas, Nevada where he pursues an ongoing interest in stochastics.



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Brust's ( Jhereg ) dynamic, inventive style makes this time-hopping, intergalactic thriller a better book than its plot initially suggests. For all the frills and furbelows--and there are many, each more bizarre than the next--the central conflict is humdrum: a fiendish paranoiac called the Physician decides to destroy his native planet in order to stop the spread of a deadly illness called Hags disease. An unlikely group of heroes goes to work to foil the madman's apocalyptic plans. These white knights double as the house band at Feng's, a bar and grill that features Jewish cooking, a dance floor and--when it takes a direct hit from an atomic warhead--a neat little trick enabling travel through time and space. The often poignant musical allusions as well as the deftly sketched cronies at Feng's contribute to the book's surprisingly subtle depth of feeling. Brust's fantasy landscape seems truer than the backdrops of many realistic novels. (Jan.)


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