Not a big Sci-Fi reader, if this falls into that category. Have read a little Bradbury. And now I remember why it was only a little. Not fond of his style. ( )

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." ( )

Being a Bradbury fan I was disappointed. Somewhere was 3.5 and I saw the carnivals and mirrors and lawns noted often in Bradbury. The second story was not produced for a reason and it dragged the small collection down to a 3. ( )

Ahora y siempre consta de dos novelas cortas de larga gestación, para fans de las imágenes más místicas tatuadas en El hombre ilustrado del maestro Ray Bradbury. En la primera de ellas, En algún lugar toca una banda..., un periodista portador de una noticia terrible salta de un tren en marcha en un pueblecito que esconde secretos maravillosos e imposibles. En la segunda, Leviatán 99, la tripulación de una nave estelar sigue a su capitán, ciego y loco, en su búsqueda por el espacio profundo para enfrentarse al destino, la eternidad e incluso a Dios.
Ahora y siempre es la obra de un artista incomparable cuyas historias han dado forma al paisaje literario norteamericano. Dos fascinantes novelas cortas (cada una de ellas única y diferente, pero puro Bradbury) que demuestran su sorprendente talento y la incontenible vitalidad de la mente, el espíritu y el corazón de este destacado narrador estadounidense.

I love Ray Bradbury's descriptive writing! These are two very different stories in one volume. SOMEWHERE A BAND IS PLAYING is a more ethereal story, set on Earth, while LEVIATHAN '99 is an updated version of a space story he wrote long ago.
~Stephanie ( )