Speed of Life

by Gregg Chadwick Julia Elliott's new novel,  The New and Improved Romie Futch , takes us on a Southern adventure that seems inspired by the absurdly picaresque world of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces , the cyber/ historic cosmography of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas,  the dangerous science of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , the obsessive hunt of Herman Melville's  Moby Dick , and the eerily foreboding scape of Don De Lillo's White Noise, blended with the environmental warning of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, all played to a soundtrack by the pioneering electronica musician Delia Derbyshire.  Romie Futch lives in an alternative yet still contemporary South Carolina, where hipsters seem to have swarmed South from Brooklyn and East from Portland to mingle and clash with characters that still haven't moved far from their High School glory days. Romie Futch is one of these down at the heels locals.  Romie's ex-wife haunts his d...

Ray Bradbury Santa Monica, California 2009 Photo by Gregg Chadwick The author Ray Bradbury died yesterday in Los Angeles. He was 91.  Gerald Jonas in t he New York Times describes Bradbury as " a master of science fiction whose lyrical evocations of the future reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of his own postwar America." After atomic weapons obliterated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fears that science had become more of a threat than a boon found their way into science fiction films and stories that depicted a dystopian future. Bradbury used the magic of stories to create literary works that used this threat as a source of tension in works that often left an impression of hope rather than horror. For the book loving Bradbury, his novel  Fahrenheit 451  - whose title refers to the temperature at which paper ignites - seems to be the most harrowing of his works. A future America that would burn books and thus control the river of ideas...