Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury died this past June, at the age of 91.  In the flurry of articles about his life, writing, and death, this one stands out as exceptional.  Here, Tim Kreider points out Bradbury's astonishing prescience; Fahrenheit 451, his most famous novel, was written in 1950, and predicts our world with uncanny precision.  As he writes, F451:

features wall-size television screens that are the centerpieces of “parlors” where people spend their evenings watching interactive soaps and vicious slapstick, live police chases and true-crime dramatizations that invite viewers to help catch the criminals. People wear “seashell” transistor radios that fit into their ears ... Mr. Bradbury’s vision of “tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, ‘Now I’m at Forty-third, now I’m at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first” has gone from science-fiction satire to dreary realism.

Yes, but as Krieder notes, the novel is not great because Bradbury predicted technologies.  It is great because he reveals the alienation, mindlessness, and violence that he saw as the necessary result of these technologies, and which we live with, hammered into us by the 24-hour news cycle.

I hadn't read F451 in several years, so I pulled down my battered old copy, "borrowed" from a high school English class, and sure to be properly returned any day now.  This copy, printed in 1990, declares its contents to be "MORE IMPORTANT NOW THAN EVER BEFORE," though when it was published, most of the technologies (and their emotional and cognitive offspring) had yet to be released upon us.  These "wonders" -- as they would surely have seemed to their audience in 1950 -- are now so ordinary that the book is barely science fiction, anymore.  F451, then, is more like the works of Margaret Atwood, powerful not for the techno-fun but for the biting critique of our own world, revealed through the mirror of the future or alternate world it presents.  As Krieder writes:

There’s already been a lot of rhapsodizing about Ray Bradbury’s “sense of wonder,” the dark magic and October chill he infused into his work. But let’s not turn him into something harmless, a kindly, childlike uncle spinning marvelous tales of rocket ships and dinosaurs. Don’t forget that he was also the crazy uncle, the dangerous one, a malcontent and a crank, alarming everyone at the dinner table with impassioned rants and dire warnings. 

This is a book about books, a book, like those of Zafón, that encourages us to realize the power of the object we hold as we read it, not the cheerful, quaint fun of reading, but the gut-wrenching, life-changing, world-shifting power of the written word.  This book about censorship should be proscribed reading in all our schools.  If you haven't read it, you must do so.  If you have, you must do so, again.