I listened to The Draco Tavern on a recent trip to Tyler. It’s a series of short stories which are loosely related to each other, but the only real constant is the Bartender Rick Schumann. Rick Schumann is characterized brilliantly by narrator Tom Weiner. He has the perfect touch as a 1940s Film Noir character running a space age watering hole.
My father in law was a huge fan of sci fi and grew up reading the pulps and listening to the radio. Now it needs to be said here that radio was the perfect format for science fiction-and by extension, audio books are better for sci fi than movies and TV shows. In I Am Legend the book we are told that the entire world is over run with vampires-Ok, we quickly imagine a world over run with vampires. In the film I Am Legend, we have to put up with bad CGI and the fakest looking zombies since Plan 9 From Outer Space.
No such worries with The Draco Tavern-we are told about the varied and sundry aliens and given brief descriptions and the rest is left up to the imagination. I had never heard of these stories before, but it seems that Larry Niven has been working on them for forty years or so. The Draco Tavern is a large bar in Siberia where all the aliens come to unwind after their long interstellar flights. They all, of course, have problems while they are in the bar, or have something happen to them. Our hero Rick Schumann has a number of otherworldly adventures and gets involved in time travel, super intelligent computers and becomes the owner of part of Mars. It’s good to be the bartender of The Draco Tavern.
Rick, of course, was the name of the bartender/night club owner in Casablanca and I could easily see Bogart playing the part of this Rick as well. As with all short stories, the real problem is not with the stories so much as with the sudden endings. In sci fi stories especially you have to spent time setting things up, them, bam-the story’s over. But they were good stories. My only real complaint would be that there needs to be a few more.
