Fuck you, Ray Bradbury

[Lethal_Babydoll]

Martin in “The Simpsons” had it right.

The ABCs of SF are:

Asimov, Bester, Clarke

[Cat_Fight]

@GESancMan

@BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed

Really? You can’t conceive of a heavily-censored, controlled society? Do you lack empathy for the North Korean people, for example? Do you hate all dystopian novels equally, then?

Reading a little much into what I said, aren’t you?

What I found ridiculous was the idea that American society would get to the point where reading was outlawed, and the job of firemen was to burn books. That’s the kind of idea for a story I’d expect an eight-year-old to come up with - and it might have sounded cool at that age, but by fourteen it was totally absurd.

Unless those books are Korans, of course!

[Jophiel]

“There Will Come Soft Rains” and “All Summer in a Day” are two of my favorite short stories.

[Yllaria]

@Slithy_Tove

. . .

I see that recent editions of the Martian Chronicles don’t include my favorite: Night Call, Collect. One of the humans abandoned alone on Mars devises a project to keep his sanity: recording a series of harassing phone calls to himself, all time-delayed to go off years later, calculated to drive him crazy. . .

Bolding mine. According to wiki, that’s because the story is in I Sing the Body Electric. From your description, I’m going to have to read that. Thanks.

[gonzomax]

" Something Wicked This Way Comes" is an extremely under rated movie.

[maladroit]

@Gagundathar

Ray Bradbury is a difficult person to categorize. Although many of his stories are set in an SF environment, they are not really hard science fiction like Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov. His use of prose is better than the average bear, and some of his earlier works are quite interesting.

Some of his horror is quite good. Something Wicked This Way Comes is a classic.

I heartily second you on his use of the language. He writes beautiful prose. I love Dandelion Wine.

[bup]

I’ll sit in the flames with you, GESancMan. I think F451 is obvious, ham-fisted, and an easy attack on a straw-man society.

Much more interesting would have been a book that showed how a society gets to that state. In my mind, Bradbury’s backstory was, “one day, someone said that books are BAD and must be BURNED, and everyone else said, ‘you are SO right!’ except for a few weirdo intellectuals.”

[Chronos]

He did show how society gets to that state. You must realize that, in F451, books in general aren’t banned. There are still legitimate books around; they’re just books of no literary value. Nobody ever sat down and said “Books are bad, we should ban them!”; instead what they said was “These particular books are bad, we should ban them!”, and then someone else said that about other books, and so on, until hardly any were left. So burning, say, a big pile of Korans is the first step towards that society, and we’re already doing that.

[JRDelirious]

@Chronos

He did show how society gets to that state. You must realize that, in F451, books in general aren’t banned. There are still legitimate books around; they’re just books of no literary value. Nobody ever sat down and said “Books are bad, we should ban them!”; instead what they said was “These particular books are bad, we should ban them!”, and then someone else said that about other books, and so on, until hardly any were left. So burning, say, a big pile of Korans is the first step towards that society, and we’re already doing that.

He even alluded to such things in other stories (including at least one of the non-Chronicles Mars stories); in one of those its scenario is that at some point in their past it started with specific books (and activities, e.g. Halloween) being supressed due of “occult” content that society decided should not be given publicity because it spread superstition, and it slippery-sloped into nothing being allowed that even addresses the supernatural other than to debunk it (nor anything else by the same authors).
The F451 society sought to make itself safe from whatever’s intellectually challenging; the fantastic element comes in then, in that eventually they take it to the extreme so that they feel the only way to be safe is to eliminate the “threat” and anything that even resembles it, and then the suppression effort becomes an end in itself, meriting pursuit by any means necessary.