Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451
Back whenever, Science Fiction was a genre I never thought about, convinced that such writers were (sorry, this is about my previous prejudices, and may not reflect reality about the genre, then or now AT ALL) geeky guys without social skills stuck in a 7 year old comic book fantasy of space-ships, ray-guns, stun-guns, giant robotic females with mammaries the size of whoopee cushions, who happened to be coloured green or red and had just dropped in from Venus or Mars.
It took me some time to realise that some writers whom I thought of as pretty thoughtful and thought provoking – H.G.Wells, George Orwell. (I liked their politics too) John Wyndham, even Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) were also writing in this genre. Science Fiction in the hands of these writers had far less to do with ray guns (or even Ray-Bans) and had everything to do with a device for looking at our society.
Then no less an admired writer (by me) than Doris Lessing began to write the stuff in the Canopus In Argos series, and moreover began banging the SF drum, saying that some of the most exciting writing was happening in the genre, as it was a perfect medium for Society to examine itself. Big ethical and philosophical ideas of now and the future could be teased out and examined, and moreover, of course, SF was a way of looking at what both a Utopia and a Dystopia might look like – or even whether Utopia itself was in fact really achievable, or just another Dystopia.
Added to my roster of other writers to admire (and I liked their politics!) were of course Lessing herself, Ursula K Le Guin and Sheri Tepper – not to mention Margaret Atwood and even Marge Piercy in Woman On The Edge Of Time. Suddenly it seemed as if there were a whole raft of feminist writers – fine writers, feminists, turning to this genre as a way of exploring gender politics, socialism – and I realised, hey, you know what, I LIKE SF!
Anyway, this preamble has brought me to re-reading some earlier SF classics, – most recently, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Now Bradbury in this book may not be writing such well crafted complex characters as some of those writers I have mentioned, and the plot itself may even be a bit sparse or creaky, but my goodness, I am shocked and chilled and awed by how much of today’s culture he was predicting 60 years ago
Reality TV where we all become content not only to 
watch others living, rather than living ourselves, but, no doubt, the next step arriving very soon where our TV becomes interactive and we ourselves get inserted as bit players in the soaps we watch, or software that inserts our names into live TV, so that the TV talks directly to us, with announcers addressing us directly. Then we can live even less.
He seems to have mainlined into the fact that we have dumbed culture down, his description of the way people talk to each other so that actually they are not talking about anything at all seems unnervingly like the “and then he said, he was like, it was, you know, like, it was, yeah, no, know what I mean?” babble. You hear these conversations all around, more and more being said without any meaning:
People don’t talk about anything’…’They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else
He predicts also the worst excesses of PC speak, and puts his finger neatly on the button of our expectation of happiness as a right, our inability to come to terms with the fact that pain and suffering are a real part of embodiment, of living in a world of matter. The best, the justest, the fairest society will not be able to end our personal suffering
Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these
I was shaking my head in amazement at the accurate identification of our can’t be still, can’t reflect society which settles for circuses (never mind the bread) and drinks, drugs, medicates, and buys its way out of having to acknowledge that pain is an unavoidable part of life itself – we will grow old (if we are that lucky); we will have to manage the loss, at some point, of those we love, and we too will die.
There is more – a society which cannot deal with complexity, with the fact there may not always be an obvious right and an obvious wrong, and this too, we cannot bear. One of the great challenges are situations where whatever action is taken, it will not be without some great cost, and yet we have to take some action, as the not taking an action is of course itself an act. Events in Syria are so much illustrative of this. I am minded of W.B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming:
The best lack all conviction, whilst the worst
Are full of Passionate intensity
How do we live having let go of the comfortable and childish security of a world which is black OR white, and let ourselves inhabit that more confusing challenging world filled with ever more subtle complexities of paradoxes, conflicts and oppositions coexisting together into and and, rather than either or?
If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.
And, seeing ahead to the vapid game show, where factual knowledge gives us the illusion we have intelligence and wisdom
Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so full of facts they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving
He talks also about our inability to bear silence – everyone cushioned from the world by their own blare of noise wall to wall music piped into our heads, children plonked in front of the pabulum TV, learning early to be passive not interactive, – even the fashion for elective caesarians on non-medical grounds.
What makes this book so powerful still is the fact that so much of its dystopian vision is the way our lives actually are; not in fact so much ‘science fiction’ after all, rather a sociological analysis
We don’t need giant invaders from other galaxies with super powerful rare weapons to destroy us, and our world. We are ourselves those violent, aggressive, alien invaders
Aggressive and power-hungry individuals are not the ones who we need to fear-it is the apathy of the masses. Beyond that, it is our complete disinterest in asking the questions of value. We never ask if the next technological discovery is actually a good thing-if, regardless of convenience, it will actually help us. We assume that what is new is what is good.
I guess the two are bedfellows – the apathy allows the power hungry to rise up to a point where they cannot be contained.
And with regard to scientific advance, we’ve never been able to avoid using whatever might aid us, be it a sharpened arrow, a stone, or an atom ripe for splitting, without also finding the possibility of the advance to get used against ourselves
Great review! I’ve never read this, but I’ve listened to it as an audiobook – I’m not sure it worked so well in that format. Must try the booky version sometime…
Mind you, when I look at the heaps and heaps of books that make wandering round my house such a hazardous venture, I wonder if book-burning might not be the answer after all… 😉
I can see (hear) it probably wouldn’t work particularly well as an audiobook – it’s the ideas which are central, and in some ways character and story are hooks to hang the ideas on. This is the only Bradbury I’ve read, and is probably the reason why I haven’t (yet) tried any of his others – whereas I think when I first read John Wyndham I wanted to read more (and re-read them several times) because he is a cracking narrative writer as well, though, on this showing, Bradbury is packing in more about the way we live now, at quite a comprehensive level
That’s the major problem with science fiction, I think – the ones with the best ideas aren’t necessarily the ones with the best writing skills, the ones you’ve mentioned, Wyndham and Wells, being notable exceptions. Asimov is another I can read happily – he’s not the greatest writer and doesn’t really do dystopia much (thankfully – I’m not a huge dystopia fan) but he’s had such an influence on other writers and on TV, film and real science (even if some scientists get a bit sniffy about him). Especially in the whole thing of using robots and androids as a means to examine what it is to be human – a genre he started, unless you count Frankenstein’s monster (more sci-fi).
Ah, Ah quivers excitedly – but my own sci fi awakening has been through those feminist socialist authors who saw the form is very different from the boys own comic stuff – I’ve been banging a drum for Christopher Priest for many years – even our lauded Patrick Flanery dib dabs with elements of what i think of as a sort of visionary dystopia or utopia that is exactly what people like Lessing/Le Guin et al are writing about – there may be some science which in the end may be what distinguishes from ‘fantasy’ writing, I’m obviously a gloomy soul at root, drawn to dystopian writing like the proverbial moth to flame.
It’s the old genre problem again – I wouldn’t class Flanery as sci-fi at all, though I grant you dystopian – in Fallen Land, anyway. No, for me, sci-fi must contain either earth-based science or space travel or aliens (at a pinch, I’ll go with out-of-control virus, but preferably one that’s escaped from a lab or sent as a weapon) – but the best of it is still about humanity. Now be careful, or I’ll start banging on about Star Trek again…
The field became much much broader – Priest has always been classed as a sci fi writer without an alien or space travel in sight and Lessing (bangs her drum again) really embraced the genre and she was the one who made me re-think it entirely. Then you have Le Guin who is examining concepts such as ‘what if our sexuality was seasonal, (like most other mammals) and less obviously either-or gendered – what effect might that have on society. Firmly classified on library shelves under Sci Fi (unless shelved under Feminist writers)
And its interesting, THIS book again, categorised as sci-fi because it is looking at a future society, there are of course a few inventions which support the changes that occur (larger and larger wall to wall TVs for example, everyone wearing little shell sized things in their ears so they can have piped in music and shut their thoughts up, manipulation of the visual media to fill us with lies, lies, and more lies. 60 years ago the little shell likes the wall TV, the ability to manipulate images probably seemed exactly SF, but it was the ideas he was exploring, and you rather have to root those in the physical reality which will help them come about
I’m afraid it was when they started lumping all sorts of non-science based stuff in that I lost interest – it’s too difficult to sift through the piles and piles of dystopian futurism to find anything that is really science fiction. That’s why Equilateral was such an unexpected joy – a return to true science fiction and if by chance it takes off, maybe it’ll encourage other writers to look properly at the genre again.
I’d say this book is sci-fi to a degree because of the future technology, but to be honest, as a purist, I wouldn’t necessarily lump it in with ‘real’ sci-fi. Futurist fiction deserves a genre of its own – and it’s own shelf in the library. Get off of sci-fi’s grass! (I may make a placard saying that.)
Now surely your wrap above is the neatest segue for me to suggest you read Sheri Tepper’s undoubtedly sci-fi (in my definition) GRASS!
We part company on this, because it is absolutely the incursion of literary writers into the genre, which got me interested in it
PS, different matter entirely, sadly disappointed with the 2nd Setterfied. It will inch on to here, as it would make my 4 star as someone else’s book, but my gush is reined in to mild approval.
It’s not that I object to literary writers doing futurist stuff, even dystopia (one day I may be so happy I need something to bring me back to a proper condition of eternal misery!) – I just object to it being called sci-fi! So before I commit, what make Grass sci-fi – or do you just mean it’s a thoroughly depressing view of the future of humanity… 😉
Shame – I haven’t even looked at it yet (the Setterfield) but have been on a run of less than stellar fiction recently (though some good factual). But Ozeki up next week.My two weeks off means I’m way behind with reviews though.
I can’t tell you I’m afraid (spoilers)
PS another recc – I know you really don’t want them, but am racing through a sly, witty, literary crime fiction (both together) called The Salinger Contract, a NG. No doubt i will be posting a review in a few days, but it is delicious (the book, not my unwritten review) Will definitely be going on a buy of Adam Langer’s back catalogue.
No, no – no cheating! You’ll just have to try to do your very best review and see if you can sneak on to next week’s TBR Thursday… 😉
Oh you are SO hard hearted! Particularly when it is almost impossible to say anything about it in order to avoid spoilers (The Salinger Contract) Grass is an interesting read but it was at the time a 3 star, and I don’t think, if I remember rightly, that it moved me enough to write a review – it was a recc from someone for its politics as much as its SFiness, and it was certainly an interesting read, and quite definitely esseffy, but I probably lost interest a bit in the more esseffy bits – so I’m not particularly saying it should go on your TBR – particularly as I’d have to re-read it in order to review it.
But no doubt I will be plentifully, though mysteriously, saying you must read this about the other. What a wicked writer he is, forcing the reader who scrupulously wants to avoid spoilers a devil of a task to review it. I will try my very best though (still a way to go, 20% left and he keeps tantalising! Even when you see things coming they are pretty bang on)
Oh, for the good old days when we used to just review things because we felt moved to! I do occasionally wonder if free books are worth the commitment – especially when I find myself using the same tired old phrases time and again…
I shall await your review with eager anticipation…
You mean, wait for my predictable overblown purple prose indicating I LOVED it ( don’t let me down, Mr Langer, you are doing very very well so far!)
Awesome review, I just finished reading it a couple of days ago and it totally hooked me in. If you have time check out my review, would love to hear your thoughts http://pimpfreud.com/2013/09/13/fahrenheit-451-1953/
Thanks for your kind comment – I like yours very much as well!
So great to see him written about. A huge fan of his work, especially his short stories.
Thanks Alex – I really got a lot out of the re-read.
If you get the chance read Long after Midnight. I’ve mentioned it twice on my site but even if you don’t click the links, you should get read the book. Such a phenomenal talent and one of my favourite writers
http://alexraphael.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/best-short-story-writers/
http://alexraphael.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/lines-of-the-day-35/