If there were ghettos in the literary world, they would be occupied by science fiction writers, the most scorned and marginalized players in the whole realm of fiction. All you need to do is look at the covers—I’m embarrassed to be seen holding these gaudy realizations of adolescent wish- fulfillment—to know what the publishers think about these books and their intended audience.
Yet somehow Ray Bradbury crossed over from sci-fi to mainstream fiction. And no book did more to secure his passage out of the ghetto than this compact volume, which is now routinely assigned in high school and college classes and was recently selected by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for its “Big Read” program. What a great choice—to promote reading with a book that showed the dangers of a bookless society!
Bradbury’s crossover success is well-deserved. Of the great dystopian classics about an imagined future— 1984 , Brave New World , The Road —this book has the most relevant things to say to us today. Orwell’s classic is bold and chilling in its depictions, but after the Berlin Wall came down (in 1989, five years after the symbolic title date), the political situation which gave rise to the novel no longer seemed quite so current. There are fewer "Big Brothers" in positions of power these days, but the book-free (and newspaper-free) society seems just around the corner.
But the brilliant move in Fahrenheit 451 was Bradbury’s co- opting the firefighters to become the censors in his dystopia. Instead of putting out fires, they start them . . . in order to eradicate books from society—the novel’s title is simply the temperature at which paper burns. The functionaries who once protected us now enslave us. This would be a masterful touch of irony if we didn’t have so many historical examples of precisely this type of corruption of once benevolent institutions. The Hegelian concept of things turning into their opposites in a dialectical process may sound like philosophical mumbo-jumbo, but Bradbury's key insight here is that these reversals are now a recurring phenomenon in contemporary life and represent a dangerous juncture—a danger amplified by the powers conferred by modern technologies.
Just re-read Bradbury’s book and ask yourself how much of it describes what we see around us? Recall that the book- burning in Fahrenheit 451 did not begin until the dumbing down of media and education had been long entrenched. Sound familiar? And in the world of Bradbury’s novel people’ s thinking skills have been enervated by their obsession with their home entertainment centers. Sound familiar? And Bradbury describes the shifts in these forms of mass entertainment that allow individuals to immerse themselves in customized and interactive stories that soon come to replace their interest in day-to-day reality. Can anyone here spell C-Y-B-E-R-S-P-A-C-E?
No, Bradbury doesn’t get credit for inventing the Internet, but his depiction of a society degraded by its own forms of mass entertainment could very well be a description of your own neighborhood. Recently Panasonic thrilled the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by unveiling a TV screen that was more than six feet high. We aren’t quite at the four walls of surround-television of Bradbury’s book, but does anyone doubt it is coming?
Yet Bradbury also deserves praise for the quality of his prose. Among the pacesetters of the post-WWII generation of sci-fi writers, Bradbury was the one who was most determined to break away from the constraints and formulas of pulp fiction writing. Even the finest books by Heinlein, Asimov and Dick are often marred by dialogue and writing hopelessly compromised by dime novel phraseology. They may be writing about the future, but too much of the prose sounds like watered down Raymond Chandler or worse.
In contrast, there is not a single hackneyed line in Fahrenheit 451 . None of the characters talk like rejects from a Bogart- Bacall movie. If you didn’t know that Ray Bradbury was more influenced by Herman Melville than by Hugo Gernsback, you might guess it just by reading this book. Yet the story has all of the exciting conceptual content, imagination and plot twists that distinguish the best science fiction writing. After all, this story first appeared in Galaxy , then another version appeared in Playboy —two periodicals that required (for different reasons) stories that grabbed their readers’ attention and didn’t let go.
Bradbury worked over the idea of book-burning censors in a number of stories written in the 1940s. In “Usher II”— included in the first edition of The Martian Chronicles , then removed in a later printing, then finally reinstated—he describes a fanatical fan of Edgar Allan Poe who plots revenge against the censors using methods drawn from Poe’s stories. In “The Exiles,” included in The Illustrated Man , Edgar Allan Poe actually appears (along with a host of other deceased writers) to get his own share of vengeance. Both these stories are incongruously set on Mars. Perhaps the most interesting angle here is Bradbury’s depiction of a book-burning mentality focused on tales of horror and imagination. A reader approaching these Bradbury works today can’t help but be reminded of the outraged religious groups complaining about the malicious influence of Harry Potter.
Yes, the zeal to censor and subjugate minds—especially young minds—continues to be a relevant issue. I look forward to a day when Fahrenheit 451 will no longer be quite so up-to- date. If that glorious time of tolerance and open-mindedness ever arrives, we will have Ray Bradbury to thank, at least in some small degree, for prodding us in the right direction.