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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
This review was originally posted on SFFINSIDERS.COM
I find myself once more struggling with these reviews. Ray Bradbury is one of those names amongst not just the world of science-fiction, but of literature more broadly, that stands as a titan among titans. Bradbury exists amongst the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem, or Frank Herbert—authors whose contributions to the genre, and to the literary world as a whole, cannot be understated. And yet, like each of the authors I’ve named here, I have read criminally little of their respective canons. Of Clarke I have only read Childhood’s End, of Lem I have only read Solaris (and what essays of his are collected in Microworlds), of Herbert I have only read Dune and The Dragon in the Sea (another which I have reviewed for SFF Insiders), and of Bradbury—before undertaking the work of reading Fahrenheit 451—I had only read The Martian Chronicles.
My struggle with each of these authors, whose works have already, quite clearly, stood the test of time and have been poured over and unpacked and critiqued by academic minds far superior to mine (in fact, the back third of my copy of Fahrenheit 451 is almost entirely essays about the work itself) is this: given the work of those who have come before me, what could I possibly add to the discussion?
It does not help that Fahrenheit 451 is, on the surface, a fairly simple book to understand. Guy Montag, the “protagonist”, is a fireman. The twist of 451 is that in this world firemen do not stop fires, they start them; and they start them for a very specific purpose: to burn books. And this was certainly not an act to which Bradbury lends any amount of moral ambiguity. Bradbury had begun writing the novella from which Fahrenheit 451 would eventually be adapted (titled The Fireman) in 1950, a mere five years after the end of World War II. Images of Germany’s Nazi party burning books en masse would still have been very fresh in reader’s minds. The book burners in Fahrenheit 451 are likewise, Bradbury would have us understand, the bad guys; and so right from the jump, we know that Montag will surely, eventually, defect from this horrendous world that’s been built up around him.
The World War II imagery is not merely confined to the act of book burning. There is a war occuring in the background of the text, off at the edges of the world Montag inhabits. Characters mention the V-2 rocket, and at one point Bradbury evokes the imagery of an atomic explosion. All this is tied together. In the internal logic of the story, the thesis of the book burning is essentially this: books require a reader to be attentive, and attentiveness promotes thought and reasoning, so in order to make a perfectly docile, perfectly stagnant, perfectly distracted populace, books must be destroyed. This process is not immediate, though. In the text, the catalyst for the obsolescence of books is laid at the feet of the other popular forms of mass media: radio, television, and film (though I’d like to believe this is merely for the sake of moving the plot along and not that Bradbury regards any of these as a higher form of art than the other. He did, after all, pen several feature-length screenplays—including a 1966 filmic adaptation of this book—and one episode of The Twilight Zone). As movies and radio became shorter, punchier, and shallower; so too did books need to compete, becoming condensed and abridged and edited and trimmed until they hardly resembled their original selves, becoming little more than bullet points with titles. And then becoming nothing but titles. Even the automobiles of this world are designed to be faster than necessary, designed to blur the landscape outside the window such that you cannot grasp its detail, lest such details distract you from being distracted. From here the final destruction of the written word is easy. Montag’s boss at the fire station proclaims:
“Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”
This bookless world allows the people within it to ignore the aforementioned war, to not think about it apart from the abstract notion of the thing itself. Montag even encounters a woman whose husband is off fighting in this war, and all she can muster to talk about it is, “It’s always someone else’s husband dies, they say,” as though this platitude might—if one believes in it hard enough—be made true, and save her husband from death on the battlefield.
I mentioned in my most recent SFF Insiders review, of Sandra Newman’s Julia (a retelling of George Orwell’s 1984), about the harrowing bleakness of Orwell’s dystopic vision of the future; and though the world of Fahrenheit 451 falls into a similar textural family, it is overcome by an entirely different kind of bleakness.
1984 is a dystopia in which the people within it can plainly grasp the horror of its world. Most of the characters in the story are simply playing a part, going through the motions of true-believer-hood merely to survive until the next sunrise; but in Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury shows us a world in which its people well and truly believe that this world is right. In the steady undoing of the written world, and the replacement of it by maximalist, shallow entertainment; the people of Bradbury’s world do not consider even for a moment that the world could be better than it is, that they are prisoners in a soft, padded, aimless America; blank slates onto which the State may daily impress fresh beliefs. And it is seemingly by happenstance that Montag is shaken from this stupor, by a chance encounter with a young girl living down the street from him. A girl whose natural curiosity sparks a similar curiosity in Montag’s mind—a spark that ignites a flame.
It is this curiosity to which I would like to draw your attention. I will not spend much more time further convincing you to read Fahrenheit 451. You should! I recommend it! But I want to spend this last section here talking about why I think you should read it, and why you should read anything at all. And that’s because I want you to be curious.
Bradbury presents us here a world without curiosity, without deeper thought; and in that loss we see a world of painful solitude. Everyone is connected, but hardly anyone really knows each other. Small talk is essentially the only conversion people are capable of having. They’ve lost the tools to speak any other way. So read this book if you’re curious. Read any book to feed that curiosity; and then never stop feeding it. Though book burning has gone out of vogue since the middle of the last century, its innocuous and insidious cousin book banning is quickly making a comeback. Those seeking to ban these books do so for the same reasons the framers of Fahrenheit 451’s new America did. They want you to remain ignorant and incurious, because then you are more malleable, more suggestable, and easier to control. Do not fall for it. Keep reading. Keep recommending. Keep reviewing. Keep telling stories. The world, and you, will be all the richer for it.
I find myself once more struggling with these reviews. Ray Bradbury is one of those names amongst not just the world of science-fiction, but of literature more broadly, that stands as a titan among titans. Bradbury exists amongst the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem, or Frank Herbert—authors whose contributions to the genre, and to the literary world as a whole, cannot be understated. And yet, like each of the authors I’ve named here, I have read criminally little of their respective canons. Of Clarke I have only read Childhood’s End, of Lem I have only read Solaris (and what essays of his are collected in Microworlds), of Herbert I have only read Dune and The Dragon in the Sea (another which I have reviewed for SFF Insiders), and of Bradbury—before undertaking the work of reading Fahrenheit 451—I had only read The Martian Chronicles.
My struggle with each of these authors, whose works have already, quite clearly, stood the test of time and have been poured over and unpacked and critiqued by academic minds far superior to mine (in fact, the back third of my copy of Fahrenheit 451 is almost entirely essays about the work itself) is this: given the work of those who have come before me, what could I possibly add to the discussion?
It does not help that Fahrenheit 451 is, on the surface, a fairly simple book to understand. Guy Montag, the “protagonist”, is a fireman. The twist of 451 is that in this world firemen do not stop fires, they start them; and they start them for a very specific purpose: to burn books. And this was certainly not an act to which Bradbury lends any amount of moral ambiguity. Bradbury had begun writing the novella from which Fahrenheit 451 would eventually be adapted (titled The Fireman) in 1950, a mere five years after the end of World War II. Images of Germany’s Nazi party burning books en masse would still have been very fresh in reader’s minds. The book burners in Fahrenheit 451 are likewise, Bradbury would have us understand, the bad guys; and so right from the jump, we know that Montag will surely, eventually, defect from this horrendous world that’s been built up around him.
The World War II imagery is not merely confined to the act of book burning. There is a war occuring in the background of the text, off at the edges of the world Montag inhabits. Characters mention the V-2 rocket, and at one point Bradbury evokes the imagery of an atomic explosion. All this is tied together. In the internal logic of the story, the thesis of the book burning is essentially this: books require a reader to be attentive, and attentiveness promotes thought and reasoning, so in order to make a perfectly docile, perfectly stagnant, perfectly distracted populace, books must be destroyed. This process is not immediate, though. In the text, the catalyst for the obsolescence of books is laid at the feet of the other popular forms of mass media: radio, television, and film (though I’d like to believe this is merely for the sake of moving the plot along and not that Bradbury regards any of these as a higher form of art than the other. He did, after all, pen several feature-length screenplays—including a 1966 filmic adaptation of this book—and one episode of The Twilight Zone). As movies and radio became shorter, punchier, and shallower; so too did books need to compete, becoming condensed and abridged and edited and trimmed until they hardly resembled their original selves, becoming little more than bullet points with titles. And then becoming nothing but titles. Even the automobiles of this world are designed to be faster than necessary, designed to blur the landscape outside the window such that you cannot grasp its detail, lest such details distract you from being distracted. From here the final destruction of the written word is easy. Montag’s boss at the fire station proclaims:
“Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”
This bookless world allows the people within it to ignore the aforementioned war, to not think about it apart from the abstract notion of the thing itself. Montag even encounters a woman whose husband is off fighting in this war, and all she can muster to talk about it is, “It’s always someone else’s husband dies, they say,” as though this platitude might—if one believes in it hard enough—be made true, and save her husband from death on the battlefield.
I mentioned in my most recent SFF Insiders review, of Sandra Newman’s Julia (a retelling of George Orwell’s 1984), about the harrowing bleakness of Orwell’s dystopic vision of the future; and though the world of Fahrenheit 451 falls into a similar textural family, it is overcome by an entirely different kind of bleakness.
1984 is a dystopia in which the people within it can plainly grasp the horror of its world. Most of the characters in the story are simply playing a part, going through the motions of true-believer-hood merely to survive until the next sunrise; but in Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury shows us a world in which its people well and truly believe that this world is right. In the steady undoing of the written world, and the replacement of it by maximalist, shallow entertainment; the people of Bradbury’s world do not consider even for a moment that the world could be better than it is, that they are prisoners in a soft, padded, aimless America; blank slates onto which the State may daily impress fresh beliefs. And it is seemingly by happenstance that Montag is shaken from this stupor, by a chance encounter with a young girl living down the street from him. A girl whose natural curiosity sparks a similar curiosity in Montag’s mind—a spark that ignites a flame.
It is this curiosity to which I would like to draw your attention. I will not spend much more time further convincing you to read Fahrenheit 451. You should! I recommend it! But I want to spend this last section here talking about why I think you should read it, and why you should read anything at all. And that’s because I want you to be curious.
Bradbury presents us here a world without curiosity, without deeper thought; and in that loss we see a world of painful solitude. Everyone is connected, but hardly anyone really knows each other. Small talk is essentially the only conversion people are capable of having. They’ve lost the tools to speak any other way. So read this book if you’re curious. Read any book to feed that curiosity; and then never stop feeding it. Though book burning has gone out of vogue since the middle of the last century, its innocuous and insidious cousin book banning is quickly making a comeback. Those seeking to ban these books do so for the same reasons the framers of Fahrenheit 451’s new America did. They want you to remain ignorant and incurious, because then you are more malleable, more suggestable, and easier to control. Do not fall for it. Keep reading. Keep recommending. Keep reviewing. Keep telling stories. The world, and you, will be all the richer for it.
adventurous
dark
hopeful
medium-paced
As much as I liked the message at the core of the book I’d like to mention the lack of world building, the end completely lost me (why is there a war? What are the sides?). For a book on the importance of literature, it’s not really a love letter the medium. Doesn’t live up to the genius concept unfortunately
"but how do i choose a substitute? do i turn in mr. jefferson? mr. thoreau? which is least valuable?"
the antithesis is censorship!!! all literature has value, all ART has value (even though some of it sucks) but to say that certain books are too "dangerous" or "inappropriate" or whatever is a complete and utter fucking lie and the people who say such are harming you i am shaking my fist at the sky and also the us government
the antithesis is censorship!!! all literature has value, all ART has value (even though some of it sucks) but to say that certain books are too "dangerous" or "inappropriate" or whatever is a complete and utter fucking lie and the people who say such are harming you i am shaking my fist at the sky and also the us government
I only read the story itself and not the historical significance at the end but I liked the book. Unfortunately it just didn’t capture my attention as much as I would have liked but still an enjoyable read.
The more this book lingers in my mind, the more I love it.
It's really about how burning *books* is bad, but more about how the loss of curiosity and critical thinking is bad. In the very beginning Montag already is subconsciously open to foreign ideas, no matter how silly they are to him. The life people live in this world is one of monotony, never changing. So, when Clarisse enters his life, that simple change in his routine affects him dramatically.
People are so comfortable in their own ignorance they don't notice they aren't happy. Two key examples of this are Millie and Beatty:
Both are parallels of the other. Millie attempts suicide at the beginning of the book, which is the inciting event I would say in Montag's entire journey. When she is saved and has all the pills taken out of her system, she doesn't remember anything. Now, this is either the effect the procedure or simply the effect of her own long conditioned mind. Nevertheless, she has seemingly no change in behavior or shows any signs of wanting to end her own life. Whatever finally pushed her to that point the night before has been once again buried deep in her mind. She clearly is unhappy in her situation but in the end, she betrays Montag. Montag is honest with her; he tries to make her understand that there is more to life than mindlessly watching 'the family' (or an apt prediction of reality/trash TV and doom scrolling on social media) but she is so complacent in how life is she actually helps to maintain it that way and rats out her own husband.
Now, Beatty is a more blatant example of this. He is on the more extreme side of this intense compliance to a life he himself hates. He clearly has been curious about books himself, he has many passages memorized and he uses his own knowledge to torment Montag, toying with him when, in hindsight, it is obvious he had known Montag was spiraling the entire time. He is a foil of Montag. He read and came the conclusion from books against learning, that knowledge was a curse and only brought trouble. However, his own knowledge on the subject proves that those ideas are actually necessary to society. The mere act of reading and absorbing information supports its importance. He was curious, and when he found that his curiosity presented problems and that those problems were bigger than anything he had encountered, he retreated back to the dull comfort of burning it. But though he 'believes' books are bad, he does not run when it is clear he might die. He continues to taunt Montag, to almost incite his own death, ironically, by burning.
Beatty burns problems, Millie buries them. Both would rather die than live in a passionless society, yet both help further it. They are both so comfortable in their uncomfort that they would rather stay complacent with what they've always known than to try and find what is missing.
Life becomes meaningless when everyone falls victim to fleeting pleasures. Yes, knowledge is hard, thinking deeply about things can lead to anguish and anxiety, but it is all we can ever do. We are meant to create art and to share our thoughts with others. Even the ideas that maybe harmful are still better than no ideas at all.
The ending of the book is so powerful because it stresses the fact that books are not what's important; it is the words within them, the people behind the words, and how the words can impact the people who read them. The groups of people who memorize passages also burn books. There is nothing tangible in the world that carries purpose, nothing material that has the key to happiness. It is ideas and forces; books are only vessels to communicate what we cannot see. And this book communicates so much of that.
It's really about how burning *books* is bad, but more about how the loss of curiosity and critical thinking is bad. In the very beginning Montag already is subconsciously open to foreign ideas, no matter how silly they are to him. The life people live in this world is one of monotony, never changing. So, when Clarisse enters his life, that simple change in his routine affects him dramatically.
People are so comfortable in their own ignorance they don't notice they aren't happy. Two key examples of this are Millie and Beatty:
Both are parallels of the other. Millie attempts suicide at the beginning of the book, which is the inciting event I would say in Montag's entire journey. When she is saved and has all the pills taken out of her system, she doesn't remember anything. Now, this is either the effect the procedure or simply the effect of her own long conditioned mind. Nevertheless, she has seemingly no change in behavior or shows any signs of wanting to end her own life. Whatever finally pushed her to that point the night before has been once again buried deep in her mind. She clearly is unhappy in her situation but in the end, she betrays Montag. Montag is honest with her; he tries to make her understand that there is more to life than mindlessly watching 'the family' (or an apt prediction of reality/trash TV and doom scrolling on social media) but she is so complacent in how life is she actually helps to maintain it that way and rats out her own husband.
Now, Beatty is a more blatant example of this. He is on the more extreme side of this intense compliance to a life he himself hates. He clearly has been curious about books himself, he has many passages memorized and he uses his own knowledge to torment Montag, toying with him when, in hindsight, it is obvious he had known Montag was spiraling the entire time. He is a foil of Montag. He read and came the conclusion from books against learning, that knowledge was a curse and only brought trouble. However, his own knowledge on the subject proves that those ideas are actually necessary to society. The mere act of reading and absorbing information supports its importance. He was curious, and when he found that his curiosity presented problems and that those problems were bigger than anything he had encountered, he retreated back to the dull comfort of burning it. But though he 'believes' books are bad, he does not run when it is clear he might die. He continues to taunt Montag, to almost incite his own death, ironically, by burning.
Beatty burns problems, Millie buries them. Both would rather die than live in a passionless society, yet both help further it. They are both so comfortable in their uncomfort that they would rather stay complacent with what they've always known than to try and find what is missing.
Life becomes meaningless when everyone falls victim to fleeting pleasures. Yes, knowledge is hard, thinking deeply about things can lead to anguish and anxiety, but it is all we can ever do. We are meant to create art and to share our thoughts with others. Even the ideas that maybe harmful are still better than no ideas at all.
The ending of the book is so powerful because it stresses the fact that books are not what's important; it is the words within them, the people behind the words, and how the words can impact the people who read them. The groups of people who memorize passages also burn books. There is nothing tangible in the world that carries purpose, nothing material that has the key to happiness. It is ideas and forces; books are only vessels to communicate what we cannot see. And this book communicates so much of that.
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
informative
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A