Fahrenheit 451 - Reading is Flammable!
Fahrenheit 451 - Reading is Flammable!
[i:11ab1a6110]- "Fahrenheit 451" is the most terrifying book I have ever read. [/i:11ab1a6110]
Ray Bradbury's 1953 phantasmagoric blockbuster "Fahrenheit 451", written at the height of the fabulist's authorial powers, is a tale of a world gone mad, a topsy-turvy America in which black leather-clad firemen race laughing on their steely Salamanders on midnight alarms, not to quench fires but to start them.
The firemen of the nightmare world of "Fahrenheit 451", of which the novel's hero Guy Montag is a dedicated one, comprise an army turned against an enemy far more insidious than Flame: they mobilize against ideas, and turn their napalm hoses on the feeble paper on which those subversive ideas are printed, and on the vulnerable binding in which the paper is housed.
When I first read "Fahrenheit 451" nearly two decades ago, I felt beaten down, nauseated and fatigued. I believed then, and believe now, that it was the most scarily bleak and mercilessly depressing book I had ever read. Even then, I felt the cushion between Bradbury's 24th century nightmare and what we call modern reality was thin and worn.
Bradbury gave us until the 24th century to submerge ourselves in the dark, sedated, media-slaked night of "Fahrenheit 451." Looking around me, I have come to the conclusion that Bradbury was a pretty optimstic guy.
Like Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" is a dystopian vision, a glimpse into a future America that is frighteningly familiar and yet horribly wrong. It is a technologically advanced, subtle, sophisticated world, full of high-definition television screens that take up an entire wall and beam 24 hour programming to a vacant and eager television audience, 24-hour Reality programming that serves up a TV "Family" more engaging, more lifelike, more agreeable, than their own.
This is a world where bored, vacuous housewives exchange barbs on the latest presidential contenders laced with observations on which candidate is the most handsome, and which has the most noticeable (to the Television Audience, naturally) facial bunion or boil. It is a world of 'seashells', tiny earphones designed to nest in the inner ear and breathe a sussurus of music into the mind of a medicated listener.
Like his English counterparts Huxley and Orwell, Bradbury has served up a soft tyrannical state manned, not by the zealous, but by zombies. It is a world ruled by the...