Callahan's Place looks, from the outside, like any other neighborhood bar: a regular crowd, a bartender who remembers your order, a fireplace nobody quite explains. What it actually is, once you've been coming long enough, is a support group with a liquor license, where the house rule is that anyone can stand up, tell the truth about the worst thing currently happening to them, and expect the room to actually help — usually with a terrible pun, sometimes with something considerably stranger.

The bar is the plot

There isn't a conventional plot holding these linked stories together so much as a place and a promise: whatever walks in the door, human, alien, temporally displaced, or quietly immortal, gets treated first as a person with a problem and only second as a premise. Robinson plays this completely straight, which is what makes the tonal whiplash work — a story can pivot from a groan-worthy pun contest to a genuinely moving account of grief inside two pages, and the book never seems to notice it's done anything unusual.

Every regular at this bar is one confession away from being the strangest person in it, and the bar doesn't care which.— Prakhar Gautam

The puns deserve their own paragraph, because they are, by design, terrible — Punday Night is a recurring institution, and the tradition is that a bad enough pun earns you the right to hurl your glass into the fireplace to a round of groans and applause. It sounds like a gimmick and functions instead as the book's entire philosophy in miniature: the community survives by turning pain into something you're allowed to laugh at together, badly, on purpose, in public.

What surprised me most was how often the actual science fiction premises — and there are real ones buried in here, including at least one patron with a genuinely enormous secret — get treated as almost incidental to the emotional work the bar is doing. This is a book about a found family disguised as a book about a bar disguised as a collection of shaggy-dog stories, and all three descriptions are simultaneously true.