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Sunday, October 22, 2006
Burn, Baby, Burn, or A Million Forbidden Books
"Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what the books say..."
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
"You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity."
Robert A. Heinlein, Logic of Empire
Guy is a fireman, glorying in his guild's mission of burning secreted books, whenever they get the call. The world -- or at least this particular media-hungry english-speaking head-up-it's-arse superpower -- wants to live in the world of its electronic living rooms, and not the irrelevant philosophical fantasies of long-dead subversives.
A parable of the dangers of censorship, Fahrenheit 451 is even better than when I was a kid. this is at once more subtle and more poetic than I remember, Ray Bradbury at the height off his form.
While there are a few places in which the parable breaks if you look at it too closely (social engineering has never been Mr. Bradbury's strongest area), the book has the aim of telling us let's not go here. Unfortunately, the world seems to have headed a bit more in this direction... 55 years after being written, Guy Montag's profession of burning inconvenient ideas seems more plausible.
Read a banned book today.
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