‘Science fiction,” said Ray Bradbury, who died Tuesday at the age of 91, “is the art of the possible. I imagine the impossible.”
And the great American writer did give us impossible worlds in which telepathic Martians collide with colonizers from Earth (“The Martian Chronicles”) and a satanic circus (“Something Wicked This Way Comes”).
But the work for which he’ll forever be celebrated is all too possible: the book-burning dystopia of “Fahrenheit 451.”
Pounded out on a rented typewriter in the UCLA library basement,the cautionary 1953 tale warned of a fascist future in which education is dumbed down, books are outlawed and America anesthetizes itself watching giant flat-screen TVs. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper — books — catches fire and burns.
The self-educated, Illinois-born Bradbury meant his story as a warning about the death of literature and the decline of literate society. In the novel, the fireman Montag (who’s paid to start fires, not put them out) accidentally reads a passage from a book he’s supposed to burn, then turns rogue, eventually falling in with a group of dissidents who keep culture alive by memorizing books — and waiting for the day after Armageddon to bring them back to life.
“I wasn’t trying to predict the future,” Bradbury told John Miller in a 2003 Wall Street Journal interview, “I was trying to prevent it.” Yet, in too many respects, it’s happening.
Speech codes. Anti-“blasphemy” and anti-“bullying” laws. Human Rights Commissions, such as the one in Canada that went after writer Mark Steyn for the “crime” of hurting Islamic feelings.
The right to free speech, no matter how offensive, was once a bedrock principle of Western society, defended by both left and right — on the theory that ideas must be tested in the public arena in order for the truth to emerge. Now it’s a source of ideological contention.
Even the First Amendment, which absolutely guarantees the right of free speech, is under attack by those wishing to curtail speech in the name of a bogus public amity.
Written as a liberal plea against ignorance and conformity, “Fahrenheit 451” has in just over half a century become a conservative free-speech rallying cry.
That change partly mirrors its author’s own journey from the Democrat who blasted the Eisenhower Republicans with a full-page ad in Variety (“Every attempt that you make to identify the Democratic Party as the party of Communism, as the ‘left-wing’ or ‘subversive’ party, I will attack with all my heart and soul”) to the late-life Tea Party supporter who said, “There is too much government today.”
Unlike other science-fiction writers, Bradbury’s chief interest lay not in technology but in the human soul. He rarely flew, never used a computer, and never — even living in Los Angeles for most of his life — learned to drive. The world inside his head was reality enough.
In his works, evil lies just beyond the sunlit perimeter, perfect children harbor murderous thoughts against their parents, and nuclear war haunts everyone’s dreams — even Martians’.
Perhaps the most lyrical writer in American letters (read “There Will Come Soft Rains” from “The Martian Chronicles”), he nevertheless penetrated the heart of contemporary darkness: the impulse toward an all-controlling — and disastrous — state.
An avid tennis player — he had a regular game with his longtime literary agent, the late Don Congdon (to whom “Fahrenheit 451” is dedicated) — Bradbury was confined to a wheelchair in later years, but never abandoned his passionate advocacy of personal freedom. When he discovered that a publisher had bowdlerized Fahrenheit 451 for a high-school edition, he growled, “I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted.”
He knew the work he would be remembered for. Before his death he ordered a tombstone that read, simply: “Author of Fahrenheit 451.”
Fahrenheit’s flaming books were the shapes of things not yet to come — impossibilities to be confined to the darkness and away from civilization. To honor his memory, let’s keep them there.