'Fahrenheit 451' is the classic novel of a post-literature future. It stands alongside Orwell '1984' and Huxley's 'Brave New World' as a prophetic account of Western civilisation's enslavement by the media, drugs, and conformity. Ray Bradbury's vision is astonishingly prophetic: wall-sized television screens showing interactive soap operas; billboards two hundred feet long, so that speeding drivers can make sense of them; a populace oblivious of everything but the constant music and news delivered by miniature speakers plugged into their ears.
Bradbury's powerful and poetic prose combines with an uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which, forty years on from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.
Untitled
In an intriguing dystopia that paralels the Nazi regime, firemen who used to put out fires now start them instead, by burning books because they're now BANNED. Reading is considered inherently subversive and disruptive to the new order. A life without books? Sounds horrible to me!
Give it a try, it's a short read and it'll get you thinking about your freedoms and love of books. - Jaidyn (QBD)
Guest, 11/07/2019
