Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Published by HarperVoyager: London, England, 2008 (1953).

As the first of the two epigraphs at the beginning of the book tells us, Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book-paper catches fire. Opening the book with this information not only gives us pertinent information about the plot we're about to read - the story follows the journey of Guy Montag, employed as a "fireman" whose job it is to burn books in a society that has outlawed their existence - but also subtly (to my thinking) comments on the stupidity of such a law; where can someone learn that Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which a book burns if they haven't read it somewhere?

First written as a novel in 1953 (and apparently published in early issues of Playboy!), the novel reads like a condemnation of our modern entertainment-driven society written before much of that society even existed! Like Jules Verne predicting submarines and rocket ships, Ray Bradbury predicts a world where people shut themselves off from reality almost every moment of the day, filling their eyes and minds with interactive "televisors" and their ears with a constant stream of advertising and noise. Guy's wife listens all evening to her "Seashells", which sound remarkably like ear-buds playing Spotify or iTunes music non-stop. The condemnation of this society is clear throughout: society has ceased to think anything meaningful for itself, and tellingly it is not the government that has banned books, but society itself, as dumbing down literature has resulted in it becoming seen as both irrelevant and a threat.

Humanity has far more 'down time' than ever, but as the retired professor Faber challenges Guy, "Off-hours, yes. But time to think? If you're not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger, then you're playing some game or sitting in some room where you can't argue with the four-wall televisor. Why? The televisor is "real." It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, "What nonsense!" (page 109).

The sad thing about the reality that Fahrenheit 451 posits is that humanity has bought so much into their entertainment-driven lifestyle that there is no easy fix to be offered. By the end of the novel it is suggested that society needs to be completely destroyed to be started again, and that inevitably the same mistakes will repeat themselves again.

Fahrenheit 451 surprised me. I wasn't expecting it to be quite as timely as it was, especially considering (like most science fiction from the early to mid twentieth century) the future depicted does have some mildly outdated social norms at play, and technology like kerosene and the almost steam-punk "Mechanical hound" are seen as the best the future has to offer.

An interesting read.

Completed 15 May 2020.


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