Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451. Yes, one of those books that's been around forever, and should've long-since read, but hadn't. I still haven't. I'm only about 25 pages in, and finding it to be far different from what I expected. I'm pleased.

The point to this is the fact of why I finally got around to reading it. My 14 yr old granddaughter was assigned the book as an 'Over-the-Summer reading assignment' - complete w/report, of course - given to students who have hopes of being accepted into the "Gifted" program.

Maybe I should've waited until I was finished w/the book, before I said anything about it, but I'm that impressed w/the choice of books. Only 25 pgs in, and AI has already been introduced, via the mechanical dog. The language, the subject matter, much of it, seems more mature than I'd give students heading into their first year of h.s. to be capable of comprehending.

Perhaps we're not giving that generation enough credit where due?

BTW, have any of y'all read it? I can't wait to read it through. Just not in the reading mood tonight.

I realize the above wasn't the best writing in the world, but, unlike me, these sci-fi writers are some of the most insightful thinkers of all time.
To read a book written in 1953 so closely correlating to today, is pretty darn fascinating.

I love it that some teachers give 14 yr old students enough credit to appreciate the substance of Fahrenheit 451. After all, isn't the book completely politically incorrect? Socially unacceptable?

No, the irony does not escape.

I don't have much to contribute I'm afraid because I haven't read it.

I read it a long time ago.  Not in school; but during one of the long winters I spent in southwestern New York State. I was 20.

The apartment I rented, was carved out of a mansion.  The ground floor was intended, by the owners of the time, as their place.  Then there were three upstairs apartments, and a common room, where the door outside (to a patio and then an outdoor flight of steps) was.

The book was there.  I read it.  My first impression was, Ray Bradbury was not a good writer.  But I was missing the point, being young, of limited imagination, and not knowing the horrors that can befall a society going amok.

I'd have to re-read it to comment intelligently; but, out of memory...Bradbury was prophetic.  We have Artificial Intelligence now and natural stupidity - and cultivated, and encouraged, ignorance.

The Walls, with their constant video streaming, are prophetic, too.  We have such hi-def video sources, and then we have to listen to the cackling hens on The View?  Or commercials where men are putting on lipstick.  Or cross-dressing hormonal-deficients are so giggly about a can of beer with the deviant's portrait on it.

I am those misfits, who went for walks instead of watching the Walls, who questioned what I was being told to do and accept and support.

And I expect I'm gonna come to a bad end of it, too.  Well...I almost made my threescore-and-ten, so it's all good.

You've an excellent memory, JPT. Your chances of contracting Alzheimer's are likely very slim.

Most of us here were/are far more interested in walks over staring at walls.

2cent wrote:You've an excellent memory, JPT.  Your chances of contracting Alzheimer's are likely very slim.

Most of us here were/are far more interested in walks over staring at walls.

Just a note - in case you hadn't gotten that far, or if others haven't read it.

Going from memory: "Walls" were whole-wall video screens. How Ray Bradbury sensed the coming huge flat-screen video projectors, I'll never know. But the idea was, to have Walls displaying an ongoing, no-plot soap-opera - apparently, interactive...which would be easy with AI.

Again, how could Bradbury have known.

The fireman who was the protagonist, was bored with such entertainment. Like another eccentric who went on walks, and got framed on a real-time video arrest...he was out, alone, one evening. It seems he met a young girl whose whole family rejected the norms.

Nothing came of it...I don't remember if this teenager led him to the old former professor who mentored him in resisting and challenging his supervisors - and who was caught, through the ear-bud radio link.

There's much of the book I'd forgotten; but the story is universal. It's Ayn Rand's plot in Atlas Shrugged - the resister, fleeing to a better society.

Casey Jones wrote:

2cent wrote:You've an excellent memory, JPT.  Your chances of contracting Alzheimer's are likely very slim.

Most of us here were/are far more interested in walks over staring at walls.

Just a note - in case you hadn't gotten that far, or if others haven't read it.

Going from memory:  "Walls" were whole-wall video screens.  How Ray Bradbury sensed the coming huge flat-screen video projectors, I'll never know.  But the idea was, to have Walls displaying an ongoing, no-plot soap-opera - apparently, interactive...which would be easy with AI.

Again, how could Bradbury have known.

The fireman who was the protagonist, was bored with such entertainment.  Like another eccentric who went on walks, and got framed on a real-time video arrest...he was out, alone, one evening.  It seems he met a young girl whose whole family rejected the norms.

Nothing came of it...I don't remember if this teenager led him to the old former professor who mentored him in resisting and challenging his supervisors - and who was caught, through the ear-bud radio link.

There's much of the book I'd forgotten; but the story is universal.  It's Ayn Rand's plot in Atlas Shrugged - the resister, fleeing to a better society.

I've gotten as far as the fireman reading through the books w/his wife, after his superior/captain came to visit, and explained the problem with books; understanding how all firemen meet that day when they can't help but be intrigued w/their content.

Like you say, Bradbury had amazing insight; those on-going, fluid video walls - which would take having some sense of AI. Yeah, how could Bradbury have known? That, along w/a society that the government saw to it never got bored, nor unhappy. There was a constant source of entertainment, so the general public never got bored enough to want, nor had the time, to think. The gov't also saw to it that the general public never had to face consequences; even built speed courses for smashing cars, walls/buildings people could beat on w/no guilt.

The correlation of all that to today is impossible to miss.

The teenager whose whole family rejected the norms has already 'disappeared.' If there's yet another teen, professor, resister, I'm yet to get there.

I'm very much looking forward to discussing this w/my g-daughter; both after she's done reading it, and the class discussion that comes later.
Yes, she attends a public school.

The professor is a hermit of an old man. I forgot how the protagonist meets him...but he gives the fireman a two-way radio ear-bud, in a coming confrontation, that the professor can coach him.

It fails. Authorities track the old man and take him down; and the fireman is sent to burn his own library and is placed under arrest.

I've forgotten how he gets out of it - maybe an accident with the fire salamander? But he winds up living in a vagrant camp - the vagrants are all scholars, they're all well read. They welcome the fireman in that he's read a few classics before he got out. They claim drugs to recall, totally, what a person had learned or read.

I've really forgotten how it wraps up. The fall of the Entertainment Nation, I think.

@Casey Jones, been meaning to get back to this. Montag, (the fireman/protagonist), and Professor Faber met in a park some years back, each having the distinct feeling that they'd be meeting again one day; and each unsure if it would be in a supportive, or combative, role.

Yeah, how amazing is it that Bradbury came up with earbuds? Not only that, but 'helicopter cameras'? (aka drones)

Montag gets out of his situation w/the help of Faber, who sends Montag on his way w/a suitcase filled w/some old, dirty clothes that Montag can change into, in order to shake off the scent of the mechanical dog. It works. Montag strips off his clothes, then floats downriver for a while, where he meets the vagrants, and is welcomed into their 'club.'

The story culminates w/the world going to war, the vagrants all looking back to see that their city has turned to a white pile of dust.

Bradbury's afterward is nearly as good as the book, itself, as he fumes against editors; people who won't do a play, because it has no women in it; and another piece, because there were no blacks.
Sound familiar?

As he said, there are far more many ways than one to burn a book.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

True of the naysayers and obstacle-specialists; and true of the stuff portrayed within the novel. The incurious bovine behavior is becoming DEPRESSINGLY familiar, now - as we're at a crisis point which could go any number of ways.

I was listening to a commentator this morning (Brannon Howze) predict that the You-Crane War is part of the systemic depopulation plans of the Weird Elitists Forum...intended to SELECTIVELY round up young people from Flyover Country, send them into the maw, without adequate equipment, with Woke leadership, and get them slaughtered. He believes it's the plan Xiden was paid by the CCP to impose - that the Chin could just come on in, with the Woketards welcoming their takeover.

Makes as much sense as anything Dementia Joe has done so far.

So, just like Montag, seems many patriots and those opposed to the Mark Of The Beast (body-chipping and CBDCs) are gonna be on the run in the woods for a time.