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.

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