will the Physician cleanse the universe of Hag's didease by killing off human race?

The way that Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille starts out, I expected it to be something in the vein of Robinson's Callahan series - and to be honest, I worried for the first few pages that it wouldn't be anything better than an obvious rip-off.

Give it a chance, though, and the story goes off in a different direction. Cowboy Feng's turns out to be a pretty good, pretty clever, surprising SF action yarn. It's a quick, fun read. ( )

As 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.
( )

I 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. ( )

I enjoyed this books about musicians in a traveling restaurant. I liked the character interactions, especially between Billy and Libby. ( )