Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With terrestrials like Carl Sagan, who needs extras? Five years ago, he brought the cosmos into your living room and became an instant star in the electronic firmament. The astronomer at Cornell now takes aim at the fiction best-seller charts. Contact, his first novel, dramatizes a pet theme: the possibility of unearthly life in the universe. Despite dialogue like "Holy Toledo. That's hundreds of janskys," the book is an engaging pastiche of science and speculation...
That work consisted of more than 400 short stories, film scripts of his novel Fahrenheit 451 for Francois Truffaut and of Moby Dick for John Huston, TV adaptations of Bradbury tales, plus poems, articles and plays. By his early 20s, the son of an impoverished electrical lineman had begun to write his way out of the Depression. The familiar Bradbury style was set early: an amalgam of myth, sentiment and evocations of Poe and H.G. Wells. At 26 he was already being asked where he got all his ideas. With that kind of reader interest, he felt secure enough...
...something in a novel. Bradbury calls it Death Is a Lone- ly Business, and he dedicates the work to such masters of the form as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. But The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep are about as close to this beachfront vaudeville as Mars and Saturn are to Pluto (the Disney dog, not the planet). It hardly matters. All of the productions, from Something Wicked This Way Comes to The Martian Chronicles, are portions sawed from a long plank called Bradbury. Brief or full length, they bear the characteristic fine grain, knots, splinters and warps...
...projects at a time, continually surprising himself. His current favorite: a space opera about a man once blinded by a comet who murderously seeks it in the void. "Sort of Ahab with jet boosters," as the author sees it. He also plans a new book of verse, a novel, a collection of articles past, and a nonfiction work on Ireland, a place he has not lived in since 1953. "I had a dream the other night," he remembers. "A voice with a brogue whispered, 'Would you moind puttin' somethin' down about me?' It was Nick, my cab driver from Dublin...
Nissenson, whose previous fiction (My Own Ground, A Pile of Stones) dealt almost exclusively with Jewish subjects, extends his range with this novel. He never steps out of character to make any of its burdens explicit. Keene does not know the meaning or historical import of the events he jots down in what he calls his "Waste Book." No longer able to believe in heavenly salvation, he does think of his journal as "my hope of Immortality." It will take a few decades to reach a firm verdict, but a first reading of The Tree of Life strongly suggests that...