I have read quite a few #dystopian novels. Some of them are the archetypes of this genre. NONE have moved me as much as Fahrenheit 451 did.
A significant part of such affectation is personal. In my life spanning three decades, reading is the most consistent thing. Yes, I have a society (primarily consisting of my wife and long-dead writers). Yes, I have had enough diversions like gaming in cybercafés until I faint. But, for at least 25 years, I have been reading, and I never quit. While I remained an ignoramus and quite a bit more confused than I was as a child, it became a part of my identity.
So, a world without access to books, and where reading is a criminal act, I surely am doomed— as if I felt the horror of it in my bones.
Many good dystopian works share an aspect with satires— exaggeration. This is often intentional. After all, we are painting a future here, and we know very little about the future. Authors often exaggerate what they know to project what can be. So, in 1953, this might sound incredible:
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. " "Snap ending. " Mildred nodded. "Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumour of a title to you, Mrs. Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.
In the twenty-first century, it doesn't sound so far from the truth with apps like Blinkist. Another such prophetic paragraph is this:
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
Without books, and full of non-combustible data, with walls of the drawing room covered with large TVs, the citizens are living in a blissful society of the spectacles where even thinking is a commodity. Faber pointed out the emptiness of such a society:
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
"I don't talk things, sir, " said Faber. "I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I'm alive."
But, I may retract the blissful part. It is surely decaying. One sign of that is the attraction to violent outlets of emotions, like extreme sports, among teenagers. It will surely collapse since most don't know how to handle advanced technology anymore.
With global literacy declining qualitatively, we are already observing some of these effects even now. While the book ends with a mildly hopeful note, I am not sure about our reality.
Nearly seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
