Title Fahrenheit 451 Author Ray Bradbury Cover Art --- Publisher Simon & Schuster - 2013 First Printing 1953
	Title Fahrenheit 451 Author Ray Bradbury Illustrator Tim Hamilton Publisher Hill and Wang - 2009 First Printing Hill and Wang - 2009
	Category Speculative Fiction Warnings --- Main Characters Guy Montag, Clarisse McClellan Main Elements Dystopia

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television 'family'. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people did not live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

Of course I've read this book before, in fact it was in high school, but this is the kind of book that requires a re-read from time to time. My copy comes with a wonderful introduction by Neil Gaiman.

The first thing we get from the introduction is that the goal of speculative fiction isn't to predict the future, because you can't do that. There are too many variables to get even remotely close to what will actually happen. However you can pick some aspect of society and say "If this goes on unchecked..." and take it to an extreme to shine a light one what is happening right now. Thus the end result is not necessarily realistic, but that's not the point, it's a warning, a wake up call to pay attention to what's going on around you.

The other thing the introduction gives us, is "what is this book about". Gaiman read the book three times at different ages and got different things out of it. It's about censorship. It's about thinking for yourself. It's about erasing the past so it's it easier for a powerful few to control the future. It's about why are books important, and what is a book. It's about how a society tries to erase that which they find offensive till nothing of any meaning is left. It's about how a Christmas song we've enjoyed for years suddenly becomes a date rape song and should be taken off the air. It's about how because Huckleberry Finn has the N word in it (even though Twain himself is anti-slavery and anti-racist and the book was actually trying to get that across) it should be banned. It's about how even Fahrenheit 451 itself was censored to remove a drug overdose scene and even the mention that Mildred was in her bed naked, and that Montag said "damn" and "hell" a couple times. Oh heaven forbid our high school students be exposed to such depravity. I mean these are high school students, they know more about drugs, nudity and profanity than their teachers do :)

Back to the intro, he also points out what a book is about is of course known by the author (like how Tolkien always objected to Lord of the Rings being an allegory of the World War, after all, he wrote it so he should know best). But an author is a creatures of his experiences and the times in which he wrote the book. Fahrenheit 451, while being a future version of our world, still feels a lot like the 1950's, and if we go back to Tolkien, he could not have helped but have been influenced by the war he fought and have it trickle unconciously into his work. And there's the reader, who takes his own experiences and reads something between the lines that the author might be surprised to find there, but is there to be found. In fact, in the intro to the graphic novel Brabury himself discovers the same thing re-reading his book 50 years later, that what he thought influenced him in writing the book was only part of it and he now sees even more than he thought he had put there.

Now, on to the book. We start with Montag burning down a house, loving it, enjoying it, taking pleasure in the way the fire consumes, nay, transforms what it burns. And when someone points out to him that she heard that once upon a time Firemen used to *stop* houses from burning he laughs at the absurdity of the idea. He tells the girl he's happy, how could he not, he loves his job? But he comes home to find is wife once again plugged into what amounts to a VR world, already in bed, and realizes that in fact happy he is not. I found this scene particularly interesting because it's very similar the one in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Apparently housewives of the future are even more bored than they were in the 50's / 60's. And as a sign of the influence of the era these books were written in, it is the wives sitting around the house waiting for their husbands to come home, addicted to the things that keep them from interacting with the rest world. (Ah look, am I now being that minority complaining about a flaw in the book that should be changed? No, in fact it's not a complaint, sure the women are brainwashed, airheaded, useless members of society here, but I can still drop this book in the context of when it was written, and the fact that there are assuredly some men just like them out there in the city too, we just don't meet them. I just thought it interesting that the same fear was still there in another author's mind over 15 years later)

After burning down a house where the owner refused to let her books burn without her, Montag because curious about these pieces of paper that people were willing to die for, in fact we find out that he was curious about this for a while. Now for what it's worth, I find it odd that the only things people seem to save is what we term literature, no sleazy romances or pulp SF. I find this odd for a few reasons - (1) I figure it being so hard to save anything, you'd grab whatever was on hand, (2) some people really like these books and they mean more to them than literature, (3) I often question what we actually consider literature, like why that book and not another? My sister complained reading some Dickens ghost stories that it was blatantly clear that he was paid by the word, and kept repeating things over, and over, and over again, dragging the story out like a soap opera. I wouldn't consider that "quality" writing, in fact in a modern book it would never get printed. So just 'cause something is old, and by a famous writer, doesn't mean it's good!! As part of a book club we once read a Nebula/Hugo winner and when done we just sort of sat there and decided that it must have been a pretty sad year for SF since if that was the best of the year, we didn't know what the rest must have been like.

As an aside, one of the thing Bradbury clearly has issue with is how TV was taking over for books and rotting people's minds. But I recall a tale from a coworker from Romania who when a child was told she was rotting her mind for reading books instead of going outside to play with friends. Each generation has their own thing that will ruin the next generation, yet the world seems to keep going century after century. There was a time with Mozart was considered the brain rotting influence! I think Facebook is an enormous waste of time except in rare cases when it really does help bring people together, but perhaps it won't destroy us anymore than TV did, than books did, than Mozart did. The future is hard to predict so we speculate instead...Still, I wonder what Brabury would think not only of the Internet, but the devices we carry around with us to keep us connected. His Seashell's did something similar, but you couldn't upload to them, and they didn't take your eyes off the road. And for what it's worth, TV can be as informative as any book. It's not about the media, but the content.

In fact, there are still books in Fahrenheit 451, the Fireman's manual is a physical book after all, and seems everyone still knows how to read. But there are no thoughts in it, just a list of rules and instructions. And apparently you can still have scripted plays in the Parlour.

The thing I remembered from high school was that it was the goverment going around burning books. What I will remember now second time around, is that it wasn't the government's doing at all, it was us (it winds up with the government taking advantage of it to feed us propaganda, but it was the people that ultimately demanded it). Each person's personal desire not to be offended by something, to have their beliefs challenged by something, to the point everything in books, TV, whatever needs to be so bland and boring and lacking anything that it no longer has meaning or purpose. To be happy through ignorance is bliss. Don't give a man two sides to a story for him to worry about and fret his poor mind, give him one...better yet, give him none! A man glances at a woman - sexual harrassment! A white man puts together a play about black slavery - cultural appropriation! Don't get me wrong, these are important issues in society today, we can't just ignore them, and in a modern book I would have absolutely complained of Brabury's depiction of women. But the past is the past, and we should learn from it and understand why an author portrayed their characters the way they did, not burn it. And the present is something else, and indeed, something pro-racists shouldn't be allowed to see the light of day, but at the same time we shouldn't knee-jerk at everything either (like saying that because Ursula K. LeGuin wrote Eartsea with their black protagonists and white antagonists that it was political correctness so was just as bad, I mean if she did the reverse it would be racist, so what options was she left with? Purple people? Or should Earthsea be burned with the rest? Which would be a loss because it wasn't even about the colour of anyone's skin but the journeys those people went on, journeys into their souls and beyond).

And people need to open their minds and not try so hard to find themselves in these books, but to see what other possibilities are out there! I don't want to read a book about characters that are like myself, I'm BORING! I always felt one should read books with people that you don't identify with, that are different from you, that makes you think of new worlds and possibilities, that live experiences different from yours, and react to similar experiences in differing ways. Isn't part of the reason to read to escape, not just your surroundings but yourself? As girl I never read a book about a "strong female heroine" thinking that could be me, after all I could never be like Katniss Everdeen even though she's a girl, there is a lot more to me than my gender, skin colour or religion. But as a girl I also didn't read Harry Potter and say, well I don't see anyone like myself here, I guess there's no place for me in the world. No, I enjoyed the story even though it was about a boy (who is an orphan, British, magical, and a million other things I'm not, though yes, I do wear glasses so we have that in common), because while I didn't think I could be Harry, I COULD see myself at Hogwarts. Frankly I didn't even want to be Harry, his life kinda sucked, no?

And I wonder, in the future, what are my thoughts and beliefs that will one day be frowned upon. Sure we can look back and say Lovecraft is racist, but he lived in a racist society, you can't expect everyone to be a Mark Twain and go against the majority, go back to Roman times and even the slaves thought slavery was a normal way of life and would in turn keep a slave given the opportunity. So I look at us now and wonder what do I consider normal but in a century or two will be so incredibly offensive it will deserve to be wiped off the history books and erased from the human conciousness...

Forgive me if this seems a rant, but frankly I'm a little scared. I mean I was aware and disturbed by events already but this book succeeded in its goal of making me think about it even more. Bradbury might have been wrong about many things, but the point he was trying to make is not only relevant today, but the issue has gotten even worse than it was when he first noticed it. In fact I didn't even realize it was an issue in the 1950's, my mother figures it just didn't end up in the news every time one book or show did something to offend someone, but Bradbury got letters asking to change things in his book so he was aware of it personally.

Like a quote from one of the reviewers of Fahrenheit 451 - "The images of fire encircle a scorpion civilization, which we watch as its tail stings its little head to death". I have to wonder if we are the watchers, or the scorpion...