Fahrenheit 451
- Sep 3, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
★★★★☆
Fahrenheit 451 was originally published in 1953 and though it may have been inspired by Nazi book burnings and ideological repression in the Soviet Union which both arose in the 1930s, I find it eerily apropos to be reading it in 2022. While we no longer burn books as in days of old, we don’t need to. In its place, we have threats, intimidation, and lawsuits to ban or censor them; we have a dangerous rise in fascist—or at least authoritarian—ideology that is becoming increasingly mainstream; and we have mass media outlets pumping out misinformation and disinformation at toxic doses to an audience eager to swallow the poison and demand more.
It should come as no surprise that writers of fiction, dystopian or otherwise, might fear a future in which books no longer exist. Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, feared those who would ban books. Huxley, in Brave New World, feared that there would be no reason to ban books because nobody would want to read them. Bradbury, in a 1994 interview, feared the rise of political correctness as a means to limit freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Sadly in 2022, we have all of those things in seemingly unlimited quantities, with Salman Rushdie’s attack in August casting a gruesome pall over an already dismal state of affairs.
For me, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a stone-cold classic, five stars all the way. I found Brave New World a still-worth-reading three stars. Fahrenheit 451 slots right in the middle: not as immediate or finely-crafted as the former, not as dated as the latter. Bradbury’s strengths here are in world-building, plot, action, and pacing. He can be a bit overwrought with the exposition and I found much of the dialogue, especially during action sequences, to be pulpy and melodramatic. In the end, this is a fine story, just not one that completely escapes its sci-fi genre wrapper.
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