Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury

There's a special king of ire you can raise among fans of the Star Wars franchise by suggesting the whole damn thing isn't science fiction at all, but rather fantasy in space. Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 mines a similar vein of having all the trappings of science fiction present simply for genre appeal, but it features none of the intelligence that makes the subgenre compelling in the first place.

Fahrenheit has futuristic fireproof structures, robots who butter bread for their humans, and houses constructed entirely of television-screen-walls. This book has got a glossy coat of science fictiony paint, but peel off that outer layer and you'll find that what's underneath is a pretty bog standard, empty-headed dystopia with very little concern for the actual science (both soft and hard) portion of the science fiction moniker.

This might not seem very important given the book is a dystopia first and a science fiction novel second, but the real bone I have to pick with Bradbury is how flatly this book falls on its face when considering the soft sciences it relies on to build its world and thus make its point about where Western civilization was headed in the 1950s and 1960s with the advent of the television. Bradbury's book lacks both the intelligent foresight of Huxley's Brave New World and the strong narrative structure of Orwell's 1984 and replaces it with little else but his rampant insecurity and incapable worldbuilding, the latter of which is perhaps what was most offensive about Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury's creation is artificial, incoherent, and completely falls apart if you think about it for more than 5 minutes.

Bradbury would have us that government has replaced books and classic liberal thinking with television as a control device. He'd have us believe that liberal arts have been all but abolished. Classic subjects in the western canon such as literature and history are no longer taught, replaced with seemingly vapid and obedience-inducing classes on television and sports and various other opiates-of-the-people. A scary thought, especially to his core audience of folks who enjoy reading literature—myself included.

But, with the absence of these classes, which are fundamental to a child's ability to learn in the first place, how are these characters even literate? Why is there a need to burn books at all when such a civilization would presumably be incapable of producing an adult capable of reading one? Further, what kind of education provides the bedrock for a civilization with such advanced robotics and technology as are present in Fahrenheit 451? Who is designing these groundbreaking new pieces of technology when children are supposedly not even taught to think critically in any fashion whatsoever? How is this society still capable of urban planning and complex public transportation? Air flight? War? The extraordinary new technologies our modern society is populated with are far from a given, which is why they've never existed in the tens of thousands of years of human civilization until just the past century. Bradbury's poor worldbuilding betrays a lack of understanding of how a modern, developed society even functions. Ironically, this book doesn't seem to understand the importance of basic critical thinking and open-mindedness to a functioning, wealthy society, despite railing against its potential extinction and rallying Bradbury's readers behind the importance of these ideas. The flimsiness and logical incoherence of Bradbury's world — something that should be the foundation on which the rest of the story converts itself organically via its plot and characters into the points he seems to want to make — wrecks the entire thing. It's infuriating, and I refuse to keep reading it.

It's a popular notion that the best children's literature is also enjoyable for adults. Fahrenheit 451 is the opposite; it's literature for adults that's so stunted and poorly conceived that it could only be genuinely enjoyed and resonant to teenagers. This is straw fiction set up by a grumbling fan of the medium of the novel who views new technology as a perversion of everything he loves. It's a pontification about the evils of stuff he hates that other people are wrong to like. It's a book with a message that works only on the outermost surface and fails at every deeper level within.

Fahrenheit 451 is "old man yells at cloud" dressed up in fancy clothes. It's old folks in the '30s telling you that jazz is just noise, in the '50s telling you that television will rot your brain, in the '70s telling you that KISS are satanists, in the '90s telling you that video games will make you shoot up schools. If this book succeeds as a cautionary tale or a prompt towards open-mindedness, it does so accidentally, in showing the dangers of becoming so secure in your own bubble that you end up dismissing new forms of media outright, rather than considering the potential strengths of such new media. Look at what television has done in the decades since Bradbury penned this novel. Some of the most successful creations of artistry have been created in this new golden age of television.

I've had one run-in with Mr. Bradbury in the past and found him so reliant on simile and purple-prose as to be unreadable. I suppose the best thing I could say about Fahrenheit 451 is that it's far more readable than Something Wicked This Way Comes, but instead of trying hard to be literary with its prose, it tries hard to be literary with its themes. Unfortunately, it fails in this manner just as badly.

Sorry Ray, but I think I hate your work.

⭐

Oliver Twist (1837) by Charles Dickens

It's difficult rating books like Oliver Twist where I seem to bounce rapidly from really loving it to grinding through, seemingly by the page.

Dickens' writing is gorgeous which makes the majority of the book an enjoyable read. His ability to set a scene is unmatched and his dialogue seems genuine, and the very setting of Victorian London is hard to beat. The credibility rising from Dickens depicting his contemporary setting only makes Oliver Twist stronger.

But the story itself, beyond these aspects, didn't engage me. Dickens' characters are pretty thin and he relies more on his wittiness and his sense of humor to carry them than their caricature-like construction. I felt little attachment to any of them and I didn't feel that any of them really grew as we continued, nor would I really have cared if they had. The only two in the whole thing I ended up rooting for were Nancy and Sikes' poor dog.

It seems like Dickens' own upbringing as a working child gave rise to much of this story. Some of the scene-by-scene events are extremely compelling — such as the Artful Dodger's courtroom shenanigans, which I later read was actually inspired by a real event witnessed by Dickens. But I never felt that the overarching story set enough framework for these moments to really shine. I suspect Dickens had a number of these scenes in mind when writing Oliver Twist, but was not as inspired when laying the foundation in which to place them.

It's worth reading, if only for the caliber of Dickens' prose:

The stars seemed, to the boy’s eyes, farther from the earth than he had ever seen them before; there was no wind; and the sombre shadows thrown by the trees upon the ground, looked sepulchral and death-like, from being so still.

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.

The sun rose and sank, and rose and sank again, and many times after that; and still the boy lay stretched on his uneasy bed, dwindling away beneath the dry and wasting heat of fever. The worm does not work more surely on the dead body, than does this slow creeping fire upon the living frame.

The child was pale and thin; his cheeks were sunken; and his eyes large and bright. The scanty parish dress, the livery of his misery, hung loosely on his feeble body; and his young limbs had wasted away, like those of an old man.

Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.

But I've already read better Dickens and I look forward to getting into some of his other, more critically celebrated work now that I've finished Oliver Twist.

⭐⭐⭐

The Terror (2007) by Dan Simmons

Simmons' work is such a Frankenstein's monster of different genres and sub-genres, modes, and styles, and he's so deft at blending the disparate appendages that the transitions between each never come close to feeling jarring or contrived.

The Terror is equal parts historical fiction and horror, with a healthy dash of Inuit mythology thrown in for good measure. The framework and foundation of The Terror is of a naval historical fiction surrounding the doomed Franklin Expedition tasked with the discovery of the Northwest passage in the mid-1840s, but I suspect Simmons' true desires were to plumb the various subgenres of horror that he blends within this larger framework. Nearly every popular subgenre of horror is present; there's the much-touted monster aspect of the story, but there also exists elements of pulpier slasher fiction in the later pages. My personal favorite — and perhaps the most disturbing of the lot, because it's true — are the descriptions of men suffering from severe bouts of scurvy. These passages are true body horror. I found myself recoiling is disgust and visceral offense while reading through them, physically cringing all the more because they weren't merely figments of Simmons' healthy (and somewhat disturbed?) imagination but real symptoms suffered by real men. Awful stuff.

Simmons is a master of pacing. At nearly 800 pages, The Terror is not a short book — and it doesn't have a vast, epic scope to help keeps things fresh and shepherd the reader through that pagecount. Simmons instead resorts to regularly changing the third person limited viewpoint characters and jumping back and forth through time. The changes in mode and voice greatly help to keep things from going stale, and the narrative blends smoothly between the different characters. The Terror never falls victim to the slog that drags other works of this nature down. It's masterful work, and its quality is telling in that it kept me burning through pages and pages of relatively minor activity set mostly all within the same ship, frozen in the same ice, over hundreds of pages of narrative.

It helps that his characters are so authentic and that their voices are all so unique. Simmons' agency in crafting the characters out of real, historical men is notable. There's a strong sense of poignancy reading through this story and knowing that the expedition is doomed to fail, because you grow to like some of these characters and to preemptively mourn their inevitable deaths. Bridgens' quiet, wise manner; Irving's youthful, hopeful naivete; Crozier's curmudgeonly manner and focus on duty. I found the main villain of the crew to be extremely compelling, as well, and the subtle way in which his evil is portrayed in the first half of the book leaves the pieces of the puzzle to the reader to put together, and colors the entire middle portion of the book with an air of negative foreshadowing. Voice is a strength, especially in the later chapters when characters' wits and mental stability begin to fail them. Simmons is a master craftsman and I'll remember certain chapters late in this book for the rest of my life due to how unique and affecting they remain to me.

I'm not sure quite what I expected when I picked this up, but it certainly wasn't what I got. I've read Simmons before — I greatly enjoyed Hyperion — and I'm beginning to think of him as one of the best modern writers I've experienced. I used to think of him as a science fiction writer, but the amount of research he's put into crafting The Terror is equal to any great writer of historical fiction I've ever read. But the real strength of this book is how Simmons colors it with his abject weirdness. The soul of horror is growing tension and creating the fear of what's to come, and Simmons is such a freaking oddball that you're never quite sure what he's going to pull out of his bag of tricks next.

In this way Simmons reminds of Stephen King. Except without the cocaine. And, you know... Actually good.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐