Category: Books

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

• • Amazon: 4.2
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Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is poetic. The title, Fahrenheit 451 symbolizes the temperature at which paper burns. This minor detail holds the premise of this dystopian novel.

Guy Montag is a fireman in a world where literature is in danger of extinction. Television is glorified and books are the source of all unhappiness and chaos. Traditionally speaking firemen usually banish fire, but in Montag's society, firemen start fires to burn books. Every printed book, as well as the house in which they are concealed in, must be obliterated.  Escorted by helicopters, and equipped with deadly hypodermic, The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department takes their job lethally serious.  They are ready to hunt down any individual who defies the rules to conserve and read books.

Back at home, Montag has a standard life. He has a wife named, Mildred, who is obsessed with television. He retreated home with a clear mind and never questions his actions. One day he meets an interesting young neighbor, Clarisse. She becomes responsible for introducing him to a time, where books were vital: the past and the future. She teaches him the significance of ideas in books, as opposed to the senseless act of watching television. This is where Bradbury shines. His commentary on the censorship of literature is straightforward but unique. In Montag's world trivial information is accepted, whereas knowledge and ideas are an evil. Fire Captain Beatty explains it best:

"Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs…. Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

Ultimately Montag questions his actions and profession when his wife puts herself in danger and Clarisse mysteriously disappears. He does the unthinkable: he begins to hide books.

The beauty of Bradbury's prose is found within the questions he indirectly raises: Why is literature important? is it of any danger? How does it influence our minds?

Some may say that Fahrenheit 451 is outdated, but the truth is that uttering such statement is narrow-minded. Fahrenheit 451 is less about how technology is infiltrating our lives, but more about Western society's blind faith in the media and government. The symbolism in this book is pure and grandiose. Reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984, Bradbury created a world where the mind is caged. No original ideas are consumed or fed; society is dormant and submissive. Ray Bradbury's vision is prophetic and poetically satirical as well as melancholic.

If you are a lover of literature, this book will puncture your heart. It is not far from the truth, which can be distressing at moments. Unlike other dystopian societies in literature, Bradbury's novel has become a historical act; it is one of the truer book in science fiction and life.

Read excerpts from the book here!

Source: theliteraryjournals

Farenheit 451 reached in and tore at my heart when I happened upon the 1966 film adaptation on television in early 70s. It prompted me to seek out the novel, which then led me to other dystopian narratives like 1984 and Animal Farm. All were potent reminders of what happens when society turns against its own people—and eerily prophetic of the times we currently find ourselves in. As I've written many times before, this is not the future I envisioned when I was a teenager.

One of the aspects of Frank Herbert's DUNE that I've always had a hard time visualizing is the concept of traveling without moving, i.e. how spacecraft get from Point A to Point B in that universe. I can't say this video totally clears it up, but it certainly provides a beautiful frame of reference.

…and why you should read it.

I love the animation.

"THAT PLANET HAS NO RIGHT TO BE THERE!"

Among the Saturnian moons, farsighted individuals, working without help or permission from any government, have established a colony. They call themselves the Kronians, after the Greek name for Saturn. Operating without the hidebound restrictions of bureaucratic Earth, the colony is a magnet, attracting the best and brightest of the home world, and has been making important new discoveries. But one of their claims — that they have found proof that the Solar System has undergone repeated cataclysms, and as recently as a few thousand years ago — flies in the face of the reigning dogma, and is under attack by the scientific establishment.
Then the planet Jupiter emits a white-hot protoplanet as large as the Earth, which is hurtling sunwards like a gigantic comet that will obliterate civilization….

Being a fan of Mr. Hogan since the 80s (Giant's Trilogy is amazing), I originally picked this book up in the early 00s. I could never get through it. The men-of-rational-thought banging their heads against the established political and scientific orthodoxy in an attempt challenge the common belief of how the solar system formed, coupled with another disaster-film end-of-the-world storyline was more than I could slog through.

But times change. The current social and political reality we find ourselves in—and my not wholly unserious desire to have a cosmic impact reset Earth—has caused me to revisit the book, and now—nearly 20 years later—it resonates.

Hogan does his homework. Everything he calls upon in his writing is based on established scientific fact, and his gift is being able to tie together disparate observations and theories to explain some of the fundamental unanswered questions in science. It was true in Giants, and it's true in Cradle.

That being said, he does tend to get a bit…wordy at times, but ultimately it pays off.

Recommended.

"Dear Aunt Sylvia,

First, thank you for the birthday card. Not that I'm admitting to being thirty-one, but if I hide the thing carefully (perhaps in the vegetable bin) maybe nobody will notice. I think twenty-eight is a much nicer age to be, and I have every intention of being twenty-eight for several more years. So you and I know the truth—so do we have to talk about it?

Now, as to the book. I've read it, and frankly, I'm not impressed. All right, so the poor broad is my age and not married. What does she expect, being a fat, ugly Jewish girl? She thinks maybe men grow on trees? Believe me, they don't. I may be Jewish, but I'm not fat or ugly, and I know: men do not grow on trees. But am I going to kill myself over it? Am I going to stick my head in an oven? Am I going to slit my wrists? No, Aunt Sylvia, I'm not. I'm going to go right on doing what I've been doing. I'm going to pull myself together, put on a nice sweater, pretend it's still 1965 and go out and find a man.

A man, you say? My nephew is going to go out and find himself a man? What have I raised? What kind of pervert did I nourish at my bosom?

That's right, Aunt Sylvia, you got yourself a queer nephew. Now, before you go running off to make Uncle Hymie rip the buttons off his vest, stop and think. It could be a lot worse. I could be a child molester. Or I could be an exhibitionist, and spend my time flashing my schwantz at Haddasah ladies and making them choke on their chicken liver. How would you like that, Aunt Sylvia? So settle down, sew the buttons back on Uncle Hymie's vest, and listen."

And so begins A Fairy Tale, written under the pseudonym S. Steinberg by John Saul.

I stumbled upon this bit of hilarity while I was coming out back in the mid 70s. While the book itself hadn't yet been published, a excerpt appeared several years prior to publication in Christopher Street, a magazine I'd serendipitously discovered in the periodical racks in the basement of the University of Arizona library. I can't tell you how much my grades suffered as a result of spending too many evenings at the library—not studying, or even partaking in, um…other diversions (which I actually didn't discover there until years later)—but rather spent pouring over back issues of Christopher Street and After Dark, tentatively taking my first hesitant steps into that dark, seductive world of the love that dare not speak its name.

When I found the book itself, several years later after moving to San Francisco, it was like meeting up with an old friend. I'd kept a xerox of the Christopher Street piece (in fact, I still have it), but here was the entire novel, fleshed out in full. It wasn't called Tinkerbell is Alive and Hanging Kelp in San Francisco as the Christopher Street excerpt had indicated, and it wasn't written by John Saul (or so I'd originally thought), but the minute I cracked the spine and started reading, I knew it was the same story and the same author.

Much like any piece of gay fiction from the era, it's a little dated in places, and obviously written before AIDS changed the world, but so many aspects of our so-called lifestyle seem timeless. The difference between my first exposure to the prose in 1977 and now is that I've lived a lot of what's in the book, or know people who have.

It was out of print for the longest time (I found my copy used), but it's actually available again—as an e-book, no less. So if you've got a few dollars to throw away, it's worth it to check it out. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

I was scanning some old negatives into the Mac a few days ago and ran across a photo I'd taken of my bedroom at my folks' house back in 1979. On the shelf above my stereo was a book I'd long forgotten, Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster. This was the first of the Star Wars novels to come out after the initial film, sometime in 1978. I no longer have the book, but I tracked down a copy at the library and have been reading it again.

Resoundingly trashed by the critics even then, it's still a fun read. Even moreso now, because it takes place in what would definitely be considered an "alternate" Star Wars universe. Coming out as it did two years before The Empire Strikes Back, all of the familiar, now-established Star Wars lexicon and mythology simply do not exist. Darth Vader is not Luke's father. Leia is not his sister (good thing too, considering some of the romantic stirrings going on between the two of them in the book). Yoda does not exist (although the planet the duo crash land on in the book does bear a striking resemblance to Dagobah, and the old woman who enlists their help does have many of Yoda's Force-wielding qualities). I've pretty much forgotten the book's entire story line since it's been twenty-five years since I last read it, so it's been interesting to glimpse into a decidedly different "long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…"