Fahrenheit 451

*** By Ray Bradbury. Part 2 in the "Books with digits in the title" series.

Skip ahead to a future where cars fly along at 100mph and more, war is imminent at all times, everyone lives in cities, and firemen don't stop fires--they start them. Guy Montag, our hero, is a fireman who comes home one night after burning down a book-filled house to encounter a young girl who asks a lot of questions. Among them: have you ever looked at the stars, are you happy?

Guy thinks he is, but of course, in our apocalyptic future, he isn't. No one is allowed to keep books anymore, let alone read them. All information is disseminated by television (immersive, four-wall, full-room television), and there's no such thing as independent thinking, just constant titillation. Eventually Guy starts to realize that pre-packaged television entertainment isn't such a hot thing. Everyone says books are dumb because there aren't enough people in them, and most of those are fake, and what good are fake people? Guy eventually starts to doubt, and where there's doubt, there's a thickening plot.

Bradbury paints a very dim picture of the future in this book. He also moves very fast, from Guy's first fire, to meeting the young girl, to his wife trying to kill herself all in the first chapter or so. Both these aspects of the book surprised me, this being my first time reading it. It's a good, fast read.

My favorite part, I think, comes at the very end. In the first of two afterwards, Bradbury talks about writing the book, how he had to rent a typewriter in the UCLA (I think... UC something) library, 30 minutes for a nickel or whatever. He had to write fast to make what little money he had stretch.

The second afterward, however, is the really meaty one. Bradbury talks about all the times his work has been slightly altered for various publications, be it changing the word "hell" to something else, taking out a chapter here or there, or other little, inconsequential bits. If you think so, I pity the fool who meets Ray in a dark alley. Every one of these instances is censorship, he contends, and cannot be called anything else. An author pours his blood, sweat, and tears into words, and it is not within the rights of anyone to change them even one letter. His passion on this point is striking, and has changed my definition of censorship--he's quite persuasive.

Posted by Joe on April 19, 2003 12:54 AM