The nature of science fiction has always been thus: no matter how far ahead authors try to think, they are always trapped in their own times. Elements of their books will invariably look dated from the moment they are published.
Ray Bradbury, who died in Los Angeles Wednesday at the grand old age of 91, was as susceptible to this as any other grand master of the genre. Read his 1953 classic of future firemen who burn books, Fahrenheit 451, and you’ll run into plenty of quaint details. Firemen smoking tobacco pipes, lit with “chemical matches.” Cheesy ads for “Denham’s Dentrifice.” 1950s lingo such as “swell”.
But brush those quirks aside, and what you’re left with is one of the most shockingly prescient dystopias ever written a far more accurate portrayal of our present problems than 1984 or anything in the works of Philip K Dick.
The most important thing to know about Fahrenheit 451 is that it is explicitly not about government censorship. (Bradbury was so firm on this point he once walked out of a UCLA class when his students tried to insist it was so.)
The firemen aren’t burning books on the orders of some shadowy Big Brother. They’re doing it, protagonist Guy Montag is told, because society as a whole turned away from the scary cacophony of knowledge, from the terror of differing opinions and the burden of having to choose between them, from deep and troubling thoughts.
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We turned away from literature and towards vapid reality television and radio shows, the book says. We
spurned any kind of poetry (Montag’s wife Millie slams Matthew Arnold’s classic Dover Beach as depressing and “disgusting”) and preferred to listen to the noise of our cars as they speed across the landscape at 100 mph.
Even when Guy wants to read his stolen books, he can’t, because the ubiquitous ads drown out his thoughts.
Any of this starting to sound familiar?
Guy and Millie Montag are disconnected by technology. They can’t talk in bed at night because Millie is listening to her “audio seashells” (headphones, basically).
She participates in a reality show with an on-screen “family”, begging her husband for more wall-sized TV screens to complete the experience. The “family” bicker and shout, but there’s very little plot to their show.
Millie can’t even remember how she and Guy met, ten years earlier. That’s some pretty advanced ADD years before ADD was even defined as a condition.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the background, there’s a longstanding war going on with another unnamed nation; a war that hardly any of the population is paying attention to. They’re much more interested in watching a high-tech police force hunt down criminals live on TV.
Add it all up, and it’s a pretty convincing picture of the 21st century’s dark side. No, our firemen don’t burn books. But if you take that as a metaphor for a fast-paced society that increasingly ignores books, that simply doesn’t have the bandwidth for them it completes a scarily accurate portrait.
So you want to honor Bradbury’s memory? Read a novel. Read poetry. Read something that disagrees with your viewpoint; heck, read something that disagrees with itself.
But whatever you do, don’t get too hung up on the format. On combustible paper or on a tablet, a novel is a novel. Bradbury may hardly have been the world’s biggest tech geek, but he did eventually allow Fahrenheit 451 to be released as an e-book.
On his website, you can watch videos of the writer explaining that technology, that the world of the Internet, is not inherently at fault; it’s how we use them that counts.
