NOW AND FOREVER; Ray Bradbury; New York: William Morrow, 2007; Fiction; 209 pp."Somewhere a Band is Playing," and "Leviathan '99" are the two novellas which make up Bradbury's latest. "Somewhere a Band is Playing" is vintage Bradbury--a young man fetches up in an isolated Western town for reasons unknown even to himself, where he finds a group of friendly but enigmatic people. He soon discovers that Summerton has no children and a purely cosmetic graveyard filled with empty graves. What he later learns, and who he becomes are different than anything ". . . dreamt of in [our] philosophy." "Leviathan '99" is a failed radio play made into a long short story meant as a space-age homage to Moby-Dick. Alas, it fails as a novella as well. Bradbury's Ahab is chasing a comet and the sterility of a computer-filled space ship in the cosmic void plays out as though it were on an empty sound stage. In short, read the first, give the second a miss.
LW
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