Dystopian Vision

Fahrenheit 451 

by Ray Bradbury

“I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.”  ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451


This is one of the great dystopian novels of all time, especially for true bibliophiles. In this age of Kindles and Nooks and Ipads this story seems almost nostalgic, a fifties rendition of the future that reminded me of an Orwellian world ruled by a Huxleyan culture.

It is written in an allegorical style with a fantastic background that mixes futuristic ideas within a rule-bound society where the many are ruled by videos and drugs. Bradbury is effective in creating a nightmare and an evocative story, for he is a brilliant storyteller and this, like most of his stories, has a fantastic edge.

A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners, Guy Montag, is the only human struggling for some truth. Montag is -- for those not familiar with the story -- a fireman. His job is to set fire to books so that no one will read and consequently understand the hopelessness of reality. He is lured into reading a book by a young woman named Clarisse who tells of a world of books, thoughts, and ideas. Of course the story of Adam and Eve immediately comes to mind. But this allegory has deeper meanings. What is the role of the book and what are the limits of language? What would you do if you realized your life is devoted to the destruction of that which you love? Are you willing to engage in the search for Truth? The denouement is brilliant and the result is a book that you will never forget. Once you have seen the amazing cinematic recreation by Francois Truffaut you will have additional images to put along side those of this book, emblazoned on your mind forever. This along with The Martian Chronicles is among my favorite Bradbury and the best fantastic fiction I have read.   (Reread (4th time)

It was a Pleasure to Burn

Fahrenheit 451 
by Ray Bradbury


“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”   ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451



This is one of the great dystopian novels of all time, especially for bibliophiles. In this age of Kindles and Nooks and Ipads this story seems almost nostalgic, a fifties rendition of the future that reminded me of an Orwellian world ruled by a Huxleyan culture.

A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed. In an ironic reversal of sorts Firemen no longer save buildings from fire (since all buildings are completely fire-proof) but, instead, they burn books. Books have long been abandoned since the multitudes live in a society where literature has deteriorated into tiny bites of data as life has speeded up (sounds like twitter). Everyone communicates orally and the home is dominated by large television wall screens that broadcast interactive reality programs. One of the book burners, Guy Montag, slowly rediscovers the importance of books and becomes one of very few humans struggling for some meaning and truth in his life. Montag is a fireman. It is his job is to set fire to books so that no one will read and consequently understand the hopelessness of reality. One day he has to burn an old woman who will not leave her books and this effects him deeply. Later that day his says to his wife, "You weren't there, You didn't see. There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."(p 48)

He meets a young woman named Clarisse who intrigues him and spurs further thoughts about his life and its meaning. Of course the story of Adam and Eve immediately comes to mind. But this allegory has deeper meanings. What is the role of the book and what are the limits of language? What would you do if you realized your life is devoted to the destruction of that which you love? Are you willing to engage in the search for Truth? For Montag, who has suffered from an unidentified malaise for some time, these thoughts have a momentous impact, leading him to question his job and the direction of his life.

The novel is written in an allegorical style with a fantastic background that mixes futuristic ideas within a rule-bound society where the masses are ruled by videos and drugs. Bradbury is effective in creating an evocative nightmare tale, for he is a brilliant storyteller. This, like most of his stories, has a fantastic edge. The denouement is brilliant and the result is a book that you will never forget. Once you have seen the amazing cinematic recreation by Francois Truffaut you will have additional images to put along side those of this book, emblazoned on your mind forever. This along with The Martian Chronicles is among my favorite Bradbury works and some of the best fantastic fiction I have read.

View all my reviews

Libraries and Ray Bradbury

While I am not self-educated in the same way as Ray Bradbury I do have a love for libraries based on my experiences that resonate with his.  From an early age I had a special relationship with libraries.  First it was spending summers visiting my hometown library for reading program books and others (I loved the history of British kings and retain an interest in history).  Later it was the High School library and memories of driving to other towns and the Whitewater College library for research papers.  When I entered the University of Wisconsin at Madison, from my Freshman year thru Graduate School, I often was ensconced in the Memorial Library stacks reading, even if not always for a class.  Since then my personal library which I began with my parents help at an early age has expanded every year.  With this in mind you may better understand why I was moved by the following excerpt from The Paris Review's interview with Ray Bradbury.


"I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. 

I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school." 

The Paris Review, Spring 2010

Dystopias

Dark Future Visions 

“As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.” 

― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

Cormac McCarthy’s tenth novel, The Road, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007 and was hailed as the ‘the first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation’. It is the story of a father and son walking alone through the ravaged landscape of a burned America to the coast.

The Road is many things, it is brilliantly-written, poetic, compelling and terrible in its beauty, but there is one thing that it certainly is not, and that is a fun read. It is, in fact, heart-breaking; playing strongly on the reader’s basic human instinct to protect their young at all costs and the father’s sense of desperation, dread and isolation are almost palpable.
The book is relentlessly bleak but it is also about love and as such utterly compelling and peculiarly life-affirming. I found it to be a both inspirational and cautionary tale and rarely have I experienced such a gamut of emotions whilst reading.

At just nigh of 200 pages it is a no more than a novella by today's standards, but this is due to McCarthy’s sparse prose, where he wastes not a single word and achieves more – and says more – than ninety nine per cent of books four or five time the size.  I highly recommend The Road;  it is one of the finest books of the last century.


The Road is a recent example of a genre with a long history.  Dystopian visions can be traced back to the twentieth century with examples like "Harrison Bergeron", a satirical, dystopian science fiction short story written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.  A more famous dystopia from the first half of the century can be found in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.  Huxley's classic prophetic novel describes the socialized horrors of a futuristic utopia devoid of individual freedom.  Whether the dystopia is a claustrophobic individual vision like "The Metamorphosis" of Kafka or a future world that has been turned upside-down like Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, dystopian visions often present a dark future for humankind.


One exception to the bleakness of the post-apocalyptic future is presented in The Dog Stars by Peter Heller.  In his dystopic vision you are left with the hope for a possibility of a better future.  An even slimmer glimmer of hope may be found at the end of Margaret Atwood's distinctive dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake.  I have not yet read the conclusion of the trilogy for which this is the first part, so I may find by the end that glimmer of hope no longer exists.  Whether dystopias bode for a perpetually dark future or one that leaves room for some hope they present imaginative visions that I find both tremendously tantalizing and endlessly fascinating.


Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.  Harper Perennial, 1998 (1932).
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller.  Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin, trans. by Harry Zohn.  Schocken Books, 1969 (1950).
The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Books

Fahrenheit 451 

by Ray Bradbury

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”  ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

This is one of the great dystopian novels of all time, especially for true bibliophiles. In this age of Kindles and Nooks and Ipads this story seems almost nostalgic, a fifties rendition of the future that reminded me of an Orwellian world ruled by a Huxleyan culture.
It is written in an allegorical style with a fantastic background that mixes futuristic ideas within a rule-bound society where the many are ruled by videos and drugs. Bradbury is effective in creating a nightmare and an evocative story, for he is a brilliant storyteller and this, like most of his stories, has a fantastic edge.
A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners, Guy Montag, is the only human struggling for some truth. Montag is -- for those not familiar with the story -- a fireman. His job is to set fire to books so that no one will read and consequently understand the hopelessness of reality. He is lured into reading a book by a young woman named Clarisse who tells of a world of books, thoughts, and ideas. Of course the story of Adam and Eve immediately comes to mind. But this allegory has deeper meanings. What is the role of the book and what are the limits of language? What would you do if you realized your life is devoted to the destruction of that which you love? Are you willing to engage in the search for Truth? The denouement is brilliant and the result is a book that you will never forget. Once you have seen the amazing cinematic recreation by Francois Truffaut you will have additional images to put along side those of this book, emblazoned on your mind forever. This along with The Martian Chronicles is among my favorite Bradbury and the best fantastic fiction I have read.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Simon & Schuster, 2012 (1951)

Bradbury's Speculative Fiction

Ray Bradbury: Mars, Books, and More

"The party moved out into the moonlight, silently. They made their way to the outer rim of the dreaming dead city in the light of the racing twin moons. Their shadows, under them, were double shadows. They did not breathe, or seemed not to, perhaps, for several minutes. They were waiting for something to stir in the dead city, some gray form to rise, some ancient ancestral shape to come galloping across the vacant sea bottom on an ancient, armored steed of impossible lineage, of unbelievable derivation."  (The Martian Chronicles --"And the Moon Be Still as Bright")

Ray Bradbury, the literary, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer died on Tuesday.  I have been a fan of his since reading The Martian Chronicles, and other works including Fahrenheit 451, when I was a teenager.  He became one of my favorite authors almost immediately and his tales, including those of Humans and Martians collected in The Martian Chronicles, were mesmerizing. He grew up in a relatively impoverished family in the 1920s and his early reading was in Edgar Allan Poe (also a favorite of mine since my pre-teen years) and others like Edgar Rice Burroughs. Even after he became famous for his own fantastic stories Bradbury was considered an outsider in traditional publishing circles, but maintained popularity with everyday folk. Time magazine labelled Bradbury "poet of the pulps" that seemed to sum up the cognoscenti's opinion of him.     While the Martian Chronicles is a short story collection that reads like a novel as the stories share the theme suggested by the title. He was widely considered to be one of the greatest and most popular American writers of speculative fiction during the twentieth century.
I read these novels more than forty years ago and have reread them since. In my reading I found Bradbury's writing memorable in many ways. In The Martian Chronicles he demonstrates an ability to capture both the wonder of space and its impact on the lives of the people who colonized Mars.  In it NASA repeatedly sends teams to explore; finally, one of them is successful. Rapid settlement follows, much like Westward Expansion in American History. Some colonists are looking for escape from civilization, but most only want to bring civilization to Mars--American civilization, that is. Finally, atomic war breaks out on Earth, and so all the humans go home.  But once more a few humans flee the war and head to Mars; when they get there, they don't make the mistake of trying to recreate American civilization. They have seen that the result of Earth civilization was war, so they burn their maps of Earth and decide to become Martians.  The stories adhere to create a novel with a dreamlike quality that made it different than the average genre fiction. This was noted by another of my favorite authors, Christopher Isherwood. A chance encounter in a Los Angeles bookstore with the British expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood gave Bradbury the opportunity to put The Martian Chronicles into the hands of a respected critic. Isherwood's glowing review followed and substantially boosted Bradbury's career.
   Fahrenheit 451 has rightly become a classic with its allegoric telling of the dystopian future where books are burned by firefighters. It describes a world where book lovers hide in the forest literally becoming the books that they love in acts of self-preservation. Like the Phoenix, a small band of people survive a holocaust to rise again in the rebirth of a new world. You never forget the opening line: "It was a pleasure to burn."
Bradbury has written many other fictions worth reading, particularly short stories evocative of his own Midwest roots in Waukegan, Illinois. Perhaps my own roots in southern Wisconsin explain in part why I enjoy his writing. Some of his other writings that I have enjoyed over the years include Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man and The Stories of Ray Bradbury ( I particularly cherished the collection The Vintage Bradbury).  Perhaps this comment about books by Bradbury is a good way to conclude:
“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”


The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. The Heritage Press, Norwalk Connecticut . 1974 (1950)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Simon & Schuster, New York. 2003 (1953)

Everyday Enlightenment

Blue Collar Intellectuals: 
When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America 

by Daniel J. Flynn

"A specific time and place gave rise to blue-collar intellectuals.  Twentieth-century America witnessed a democratization of education unparalleled in human history." and "Blue-collar intellectuals proved as unsettling to the intellectual elite as the nouveau riche had been to old money." (p 10)


I have neither the patience nor the political wonkism to view C-SPAN on a regular basis, but I am a frequent viewer of their cultural programming called BOOKTV on C-SPAN2 weekends. It was there that I saw Daniel J. Flynn lecture on the topic of his enlightening book, Blue Collar Intellectuals. Inspired, I acquired the book and was not disappointed with his stories of five intellectuals, outsiders with uncommon backgrounds, who reached out to "blue collar" people everywhere.
I first encountered one of the five intellectuals included in Flynn's book during my teen years reading science fiction. One of my favorite authors was Ray Bradbury and his tales, especially those of Humans and Martians collected in The Martian Chronicles. Flynn tells of Bradbury's impoverished family background as he grew up in the 1920s and his early reading of Edgar Allan Poe (also a favorite of mine since my pre-teen years) and others like Edgar Rice Burroughs. Even after he became famous for his own fantastic stories Bradbury was considered an outsider in traditional publishing circles, but maintained popularity with everyday folk. Time magazine labelled Bradbury "poet of the pulps" that seemed to sum up the cognoscenti's opinion of him.
My next encounter with the intellectuals that Daniel Flynn depicts did not begin until I was on my way to college at the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 1967. Required reading for all incoming freshmen was a short book by Eric Hoffer, The True Believer. This was my introduction to one of Flynn's "Blue Collar Intellectuals" and to a book that is as relevant today as it was forty-five years ago. While distant from Hoffer in his political philosophy, Milton Friedman shared similar blue collar background and an ability to explain complex ideas of economics to the readership of Newsweek magazine and also to the viewers of PBS through his multi-part series "Free to Choose". In that same year of 1967 as a freshman student in "Honors Economics" I read Friedman's most famous book, Capitalism and Freedom, and in it found some of the principles that I hold dear to this day.  These two experiences with blue-collar intellectuals belie somewhat Flynn's claim that these writers were all completely excluded from the realms of the cognoscenti, but they do not deflate his claim that they all had a special ability to communicate with the common man.
Also included in the book are sections on Will Durant, who went from anarchist speaker to become a popularizer of history both of philosophy and civilization, and while I have not read the eleven volumes of Will & Ariel Durants' History of Civilization from cover to cover, I have dipped in to sections of the books from time to time. Finally, he tells the story of Mortimer Adler who founded the "Great Books" movement and wrote many books explaining the ideas in those books. I, too, was inspired by the lure of great books and have spent more than twenty years of my adult life reading them in the Basic Program of Liberal Education at the University of Chicago. These form the foundation for my reading and my participation in the search (see The Moviegoer by Walker Percy).
In his book Daniel Flynn is able to clearly and succinctly elucidate the inspirational achievements of these blue collar intellectuals and how they shaped an era in which popular culture included a significant place for serious ideas. One of the most important lessons imparted by the lives of these intellectuals is how they inspired readers like myself to continue to read and learn and love the search for ideas in books.

Blue Collar Intellectuals by Daniel J. Flynn. ISI Books, 2011

Malevolent Carnival

Something Wicked 

This Way Comes

by Ray Bradbury

Those trains and their grieving sounds were lost forever between stations, not remembering where they had been, not guessing where they might go, exhaling their last pale breaths over the horizon, gone. So it was with all trains, ever. - Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

The annual county fair was always an event at the end of each Summer that I looked forward to when I was a young boy growing up in a small Wisconsin town.  It was fun and something in which our whole family participated.  In contrast to my personal experience, Something Wicked This Way Comes is the story of two 13-year-old boys, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway, who have a harrowing experience with a nightmarish traveling carnival that comes to their Midwestern town one October. The carnival's leader is the mysterious "Mr. Dark" who bears a tattoo for each person who, lured by the offer to live out his secret fantasies, has become bound in service to the carnival. Mr. Dark's malevolent presence is countered by that of Will's father, Charles Halloway, who harbors his own secret desire to regain his youth.
The novel combines elements of fantasy and horror, analyzing the conflicting natures of good and evil, and on how they come into play between the characters and the carnival. Unlike many of Bradbury's other works, including the tangentially related Dandelion Wine, which is a collection of loosely related short stories, Something Wicked This Way Comes is a full-length novel.  The novel may be interpreted as an autumn sequel to the summer of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. The two works are set in the fictitious Green Town (based on Bradbury's hometown, Waukegan, Illinois), but have different tones, with Something Wicked emphasizing the more serious side of the transition from childhood to adulthood. While none of the characters in Dandelion Wine make an appearance in Something Wicked, William Halloway and Jim Nightshade can be viewed as one-year older representations of Dandelion Wine's Douglas Spaulding and John Huff, respectively.  I will never forget my first reading of this book almost forty years ago. Bradbury's work is the quintessential small-town-meets-the-fantastic style novel that so many talespinners have emulated since.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.

Nostalgia and Fantasy

Dandelion Wine
by Ray Bradbury

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.”  ― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine



In effect this book is a perfect blend of nostalgia and fantasy in which Bradbury creates a dream world. My personal preference is for his later science fiction like The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451; however, Dandelion Wine, along with many of his fine short stories collected in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, is almost as enjoyable a read. This novel is semi-autobiographical, taking place in the summer of 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois, presumably a pseudonym for Bradbury's childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois.
The title refers to a wine made with dandelion petals and other ingredients, commonly citrus fruit. In the story, dandelion wine, as made by the protagonist's grandfather, serves as a metaphor for packing all of the joys of summer into a single bottle. The main character of the story is Douglas Spaulding, a 12-year-old boy loosely patterned after the author. Most of the book is focused upon the routines of small-town America, and the simple joys of yesteryear.
As Bradbury writes in "Just This Side of Byzantium," a 1974 essay used as an introduction to the book, Dandelion Wine is a recreation of a boy's childhood, based upon an intertwining of Bradbury's actual experiences and his unique imagination. Dandelion wine is presented as a metaphor of summer, bottled for the winter season of illnesses and wheezing.
In Douglas' words: "Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered."
Dandelion Wine has been described as the first of Bradbury's nostalgic "autobiographical fantasies," in which he recreates the childhood memories of his hometown, Waukegan, in the form of a lyrical work, with realistic plots and settings touched with fantasy to represent the magic and wonders of childhood. Even with the focus on the bright days of summer, Bradbury, in his typical style, briefly explores the horrific side of these events.
Farewell Summer, the official sequel to Dandelion Wine, was published in October 2006. While Farewell Summer is a direct continuation of the plot of Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, a novel with a completely different plot and characters, is often paired with the latter because of their stylistic and thematic similarities.


Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Simon & Schuster, New York. 2000 (1957)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Ballantine Books, New York. 1987
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. The Heritage Press. 1974
The Stories of Ray Bradbury. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1981

Fantastic Stories and More

Ray Bradbury

Yesterday was the anniversary of the birth of Ray Bradbury (1920), the literary, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. I am noting this because my favorite novels include his 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. The latter is a book which has been described both as a short story collection and a novel. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most popular American writers of speculative fiction during the twentieth century.
I read these novels more than forty years ago and have reread them since. In my reading I found Bradbury's writing memorable in many ways. In The Martian Chronicles he demonstrates an ability to capture both the wonder of space and its impact on the lives of the people who colonized Mars. The stories adhere to create a novel with a dreamlike quality that made it different than the average genre fiction. This was noted by another of my favorite authors, Christopher Isherwood. A chance encounter in a Los Angeles bookstore with the British expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood gave Bradbury the opportunity to put The Martian Chronicles into the hands of a respected critic. Isherwood's glowing review followed and substantially boosted Bradbury's career.
Fahrenheit 451 has rightly become a classic with its allegoric telling of the dystopian future where books are burned by firefighters. It describes a world where book lovers hide in the forest literally becoming the books that they love in acts of self-preservation. Like the Phoenix, a small band of people survive a holocaust to rise again in the rebirth of a new world. You never forget the opening line: "It was a pleasure to burn."
Bradbury has written many other fictions worth reading, particularly short stories evocative of his own Midwest roots in Waukegan, Illinois. Perhaps my own roots in southern Wisconsin explain in part why I enjoy his writing. Some of his other writings that I have enjoyed over the years include Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man and The Stories of Ray Bradbury ( I particularly cherished the collection The Vintage Bradbury).




The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. The Heritage Press, Norwalk Connecticut . 1974 (1950)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Simon & Schuster, New York. 2003 (1953)