Not everyone is caught under a spell of technological speed and savvy. But in Fahrenheit 451, there’s room for the literarily curious. Bradbury’s tale might hint a bit more at the censorial Huxley’s hot take was that there would be no need to ban books because eventually no one would want to read them. Citizens live in a perpetual condition of distraction.

Both societies are technologically advanced, with traditional institutions and morality long gone. The novel overlaps a good deal with Huxley’s Brave New World. So, what is the warning in Bradbury’s classic dystopian tale? Culture: To Build or to Burn? As such, the issue gets highlighted from a creative angle and floods it with a sense of urgency. In the novel’s introduction, fantasy writer Neil Gaiman notes that speculative fiction, while cautionary, isn’t about the future but about a characteristic of the present world. This fireman is a member of a brigade tasked with the destruction of literature. It’s the riotous, mega-talented sci-fi writer’s most famous work (though I’d argue not quite his best) and follows the life of a fireman, Guy Montag, whose main job is not to squelch housefires but to burn books, and the houses that hold them. The conversation over prophetic twentieth-century texts often homes in on these two admirable books, but another classic dystopian novel pokes its head from behind the curtain, asking to be regarded: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Which one was right, Brave New World or 1984? Are we living in a hedonistic mirage or a totalitarian face-stamping global regime?

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Fahrenheit 451 author