Free Republic

Hasil Adkins. That's pronounced "hassle." Never has a name been more apropos - and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Adkins, who died April 26, was his own beast, musically and socially. Adkins was one of rock 'n' roll's great characters, the cultural missing link between Ernest T. Bass and Jerry Lee Lewis, replete with a downwind slaughterhouse whiff of Hank Williams and Sid Vicious. He was a brawling boozehound and a law-breaking hellion who lived in rural West Virginia, a musical menace from the cinematic fringes of Deliverance. He was also the unwitting archetype of the doublewide, downwardly mobile...

Is Science Fiction About To Go Blind The starship Field Circus is racing through space on a seven-year journey to a brown dwarf three light-years from Earth and, if all goes well, a business meeting with an alien civilization from another universe. It’s around the year 2030, and there’s time to kill, so three crew members, Boris, Pierre and Su Ang, are sitting in the bar, a wood-paneled room modeled after a 300-year-old pub in Amsterdam. There’s a 16-page beer menu, but Boris has opted for a cocktail made of baby jellyfish. Pierre is angling for a sip when Donna...