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Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Whales in the Sky and People Who Don't Die
Title: Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band is Playing and Leviathan '99
Author: Ray Bradbury
Boy, Bradbury sure writes some crazy stuff. In Somewhere a Band is Playing, he interweaves poetry into the story of a writer who travels to a town where no one ages. He's carrying bad news that he is hesitant to relate. He meets a woman who is beautiful and young and Nefertiti all in one. She is Nefertiti. She is other women. The bad news is that a new highway is going to be built through the town with complete disregard for the inhabitants. The town isn't even on the map. Will the writer follow the townspeople to a new location and never age? You'll have to read the book to find out.
In Leviathan '99, there's a crazy spaceship captain, an alien named Quell, and the main character. He has a name, I just forget it. And there's Leviathan. The comet of all comets. Hell is a comet and it's name is Leviathan. And the crazy captain is out to destroy the comet that took his sight oh-so-many-years-ago. And only one will survive. I won't tell you who. I can't anyway, because I don't remember his name.
I'm not sure I'm going to read Bradbury much after this. Not that it was a bad read, just that I don't think it's my thing.Labels: crazy fiction
posted by Kate at
7:54 PM
1 Comments:
Bradbury was two things: brilliant, and out of his goddamned mind. I read a couple collections of his short stories in high school, and most of them ring of the same ideas it looks like those books had--science fiction before writers knew much about science. He'd come up with these wildly imaginative ideas, and then just make up the concepts that might support those ideas enough to help the story stand upright. A lot of them seemed to revolve around the idea of reality's fluidity--that you could be made to believe something so fully that to you, it was actually true. That came out in a lot of his outer-space stories, especially on Mars. I haven't read any of his stuff in a while. Now you've given me a craving. I need to peek inside a mind more messed-up than mine.
11/21/2007 7:18 AM
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