Arbieroo reviewed Now and Forever by Ray Bradbury
Review of 'Now and Forever' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Two novellas, published late in Bradbury's life, having gestated over decades.
Somewhere a Band is Playing
Beautiful.
A journalist sniffs a story and jumps off a train into a small town in Arizona, forgotten by the world. A story only Bradbury could make work ensues.
As an aside, in the Introduction, we learn that the inspiritaion for Nef in this story (and obviously for the movie star in Death is a Lonely Business) was none other than Katherine Hepburn. Well, it was obvious that there was a real world inspiration for those characters but exactly which leading lady from the Hollywood Age of Elegance was not easily guessed.
Leviathan '99
Bradbury went to Ireland when he wrote the screenplay for the film Moby Dick. The experience stuck with him, as his many Irish stories testify, but apparently the White Whale and Ahab stuck with him, too, since he wrote a …
Two novellas, published late in Bradbury's life, having gestated over decades.
Somewhere a Band is Playing
Beautiful.
A journalist sniffs a story and jumps off a train into a small town in Arizona, forgotten by the world. A story only Bradbury could make work ensues.
As an aside, in the Introduction, we learn that the inspiritaion for Nef in this story (and obviously for the movie star in Death is a Lonely Business) was none other than Katherine Hepburn. Well, it was obvious that there was a real world inspiration for those characters but exactly which leading lady from the Hollywood Age of Elegance was not easily guessed.
Leviathan '99
Bradbury went to Ireland when he wrote the screenplay for the film Moby Dick. The experience stuck with him, as his many Irish stories testify, but apparently the White Whale and Ahab stuck with him, too, since he wrote a radio play SF adaptation of the book (broadcast by the BBC), too and eventually that evolved into this novella, which is - bonkers.
There's a long tradition of these literary adaptations, of course, even just within SF, perhaps most famously, The Forbidden Planet being a take on Shakespeare's The Tempest. But despite being widely considered an SF writer, Bradbury for the most part stood apart from the mainstream development of the genre, not being really all that interested in science. And so if you go into this expecting a competent space opera, you will be very disappointed. Instead, it is necessary to ignore everything technical, which may as well be magic, and focus on this brief (unlike the voluminous original) examination of self-destructive obsession with it's weird telepathic alien "Queequeg" and blind "Ahab."