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Thread for discussion of part 3 of Fahrenheit 451 : Burning Bright.

I am going to copy and paste an issue addressed in an earlier thread here, where we don't have to worry about potential spoilers:
Whitney wrote: "Cecily wrote: " I see what you mean: in both cases, the woman opens the eyes of the man to other possibilities. However, the two women themselves could hardly be more different. ..."

Clarisse strikes me as an early example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Apparently the term has made it into the Oxford Dictionaries: "a type of female character depicted as vivacious and appealingly quirky, whose main purpose within the narrative is to inspire a greater appreciation for life in a male protagonist"

========
Yeah, I saw that accusation being made against Julia in 1984 as well, but tbh, I think that it is missing the point.

The pixie girl is a feminist creation to identify women who exist mainly for the benefit of the male protagonist, but I think that in We, 1984 or Fahrenheit 451, the gender of each protagonist doesn't really matter, because it's not really pertinent to the main point of the story. The protagonist could just as well, have been female, and the love interest could have been a male or another female.

The main point is that in all three of these stories, the protagonist represents the naif, a person who gullibly believes the lies spread by the ruling regime, and he is, in every instance, a product of the policies of that regime. In every instance, the female character represents a rebel against the system, and honestly, the genders could just as well have been reversed - but if they had been, I suspect there would have had even worse accusations of sexism leveled against these stories.

One way the author could have overcome this, would have been to make the characters gay, but them it would have drawn focus to the gay aspect away from the point that the authors of each of these stories were trying to make - being a focus on the sheep mentality of populations who tend to be controlled by authoritarian regimes.

I wasn't intending to get into any kind of discussion of sexism in F451, social dissection of SF from the 50's is a much larger discussion that has taken place and should take place in many other forums.

The manic pixie dream girl per se isn't problematic, she is frequently an intelligent, interesting character with a rich life. In modern film criticism she only becomes sexist when we see her appearing over and over as yet another example of a female in a film existing primarlily to motivate change in the male protagonist. And, sure, in many of these films the male and female roles could be reversed, but the entire point is that they aren't.

I only meant to point out that it was interesting that Clarisse was a character that fit the type handily, 50 years before the term was invented to describe a phenomenon in recent films.

I hadn't read F451 in probably 30 years now before this reread. So much I didn't remember. The fact that there was a war going on, and all the suicides and death-wish behavior. I recalled Mildred's attempt, but not the endemic quality of them.

Interesting to note that Faber says that focussing on just nice things maybe wouldn't be such a problem if there wasn't a war going on. The suicides imply a very personal emptiness when imagination and deeper thought are curtailed, while Faber's comment implies that his issue is also with the effect on society, more in line with "1984". The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive, of course, and the line does speak to why the government is dedicated to keeping people in their trance-like lives.

Whitney wrote: "I wasn't intending to get into any kind of discussion of sexism in F451, social dissection of SF from the 50's is a much larger discussion that has taken place and should take place in many other f..."

Ah, yes, looking now at the definition you had linked to, I can see that I had previously formed a skewed notion of the trope because of the context it was used in in a review of 1984 that I had read and which had greatly irritated me at the time.

Thanks for pointing out the origins of the term, and for throwing light on the fact that it tends to be a bit mis/overused these days. :)

Whitney wrote: "I hadn't read F451 in probably 30 years now before this reread. So much I didn't remember. The fact that there was a war going on, and all the suicides and death-wish behavior. I recalled Mildred's..."

Agreed with all that, but, in spite of apparently being partly inspired by Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, I read more than just warnings against totalitarianism in the book, about which I will say more soon.

In the meantime, before I forget, I wanted to say something about Darkness at Noon that I have found: In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Darkness at Noon number eight on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Besides that, it is a book I have been wanting to read for the longest time, so I do hope folks around here would be up for a discussion of that!

Back in a mo...

Discussion from previous thread: Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "SF that is not hard SF is still SF, yes? Lots of SF concerns itself more with social issues than technology. It's true that I will give a little on hard SF on characterization IF the ideas are spectacular...."

...but sometimes the ideas are really the thing. Take Borges for example. There it's the structure and the ideas that count, and characterization takes a back seat.

In Fahrenheit, there is nothing new, nothing interesting either technologically or in any other respect either - he says nothing new that could not have been applied to people 2 or 3 or 4 centuries ago, and that had not been said before.

I'd like to try and tie in the themes previously discussed with my gripe about how disjointed in spite of its simplicity the plot is.

What exactly is it that Bradbury is trying to say? One of the things he says is that we need to read and reflect. Looking at today's glut of information in our information society, that is a valid point, indeed, and one addressed by theorists more eloquent than Bradbury, but its a valid point nevertheless, that the information that mass media bombards us with, tends to be fluffy stuff, not stuff that really challenges you and enriches you.

Ugh, and now I have to go. Will be back with more a bit later, my apologies.

Traveller wrote: "Take Borges for example. There it's the structure and the ideas that count, and characterization takes a back seat."

Hmm. Not sure I agree. Borges' narrators in particular tend to come through to me with awesome characterization, even though it is sparse. The small touches, they live.

I guess what I am going for is that ideas may be the main attraction, but it is possible to do ideas while still delivering a believable character, with the promise of all the depth you'd expect even if that is not laid out in the prose. Sometimes that is better.

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: " I guess what I am going for is that ideas may be the main attraction, but it is possible to do ideas while still delivering a believable character, ... "

Okay, we might differ on some details, but in the end analysis, we are actually agreeing on one point about this specific book - that we both feel that the characterization could have been better, amirite?

You are right. We are disagreeing to agree. I would have been more happy with the book as a whole if Clarissa had not been at all and if Millie had been allowed to be all the she could. And if Montag had been a coherent character; totally agree with you on that.

In any case, the point that I keep wanting to get to before I get sidetracked, is the coherence thing, and it is something that could relatively easily have been remedied, IMO.

At the start of the book, Bradbury is basically saying that people deliberately suppress information that they find threatening, taxing and/or discomfiting, and I am totally with him on that - we all know how it goes with warring ideologies - each one tries to shout down the other one because they don't like what the others are saying, and as already mentioned, we don't need governments to do this for us.

[...and in this very thing I find a huge irony, btw (getting sidetracked again, oi!) , because on various platforms, Bradbury would keep shouting down "minorities"; he would keep shouting down pleas for equality based on? hot air, really - he blubbers and blusters, and employs fallacies of presumption - he tries to create the impression that if we had to give in to every minority claim, there'd never be an end to it - sort of a slippery slope argument mixed with a subjectivist fallacy mixed with a sweeping generalization fallacy...
..and here I refer to the following:
“Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. ]

..anyway, so as I was saying, at the start it's the burning the books which is a bit of a befuddled argument too, the reasoning behind how it all works, but let's give him leeway on that. My real bugbear is the war. The war is just mentioned as a sort of aside for most of the book, and for most of the book, we have all this karfuffle about the bookburning and hound (what is the point of the hound in the overall development of the plot, anyway? Take out the hound and the story is still the same, so the hound is really just an added silliness), but actually, what the story appears to be about at THE END, is that the people ... well, what? There was a war that destroyed them all because people do not pay attention to history, is what he seems to be trying to say, but he does not say it very eloquently at all... I mean, one has no idea who the government is, and how the war came about, and if the man in the street could have had and/or would have had any say in the waging of this war... I mean, it's just all garbled and not sufficiently developed at all.

Not to mention, that I found the whole oral tradition thing just as distracting to any potential central message. On the one hand, Bradbury seems to be trying to say that people are avoiding challenging ideas (just like he himself avoids the "assualt" from minorities (I will quote from one of his essays later, to further illustrate his hypocrisy)) and in the next instance, it is suddenly about the physical books - he doesn't seem able to establish coherently that the paper and ink is not the same thing as the ideas encompassed in books - and also, it seems very important to him to preserve "certain" people's ideas, whereas I think (in my own personal little ideology) it would have been a lot more productive to rather suggest that people should engage with existing texts and assimilate them to build one's own new ideas upon these historical texts. Bradbury seems to miss the point that culture is a dynamic thing, that it should move with the times, that there is no value in trying to freeze reality into moments past.

And to prove my point about his rightwing sentiments, I quote some excerpts from the coda by Ray Bradbury:

About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles. But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles? A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms, and why didn’t I “do them over��? Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.
[...]
A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the Moby-Dick mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captain who venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premiers as an opera in Paris this autumn. But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared do my play—it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ball-bats if the drama department even tried!

Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males! I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t. For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conservationist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics.

The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my books or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar-school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit�� so it shapes “Zoot,�� may the belt unravel and the pants fall. For, let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton, or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine . . . the life, the soul of reading!�� Take them out, and one cold, eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them in the writer—he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail. In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings, or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book. All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases.

Well, Ray Bradbury, I get to rate, and it's not going to be pretty. >:(

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "You are right. We are disagreeing to agree. I would have been more happy with the book as a whole if Clarissa had not been at all and if Millie had been allowed to be all the she could. And if Mont..."

I'm happy, I suppose, with Clarisse being the good guy and Millie being the bad guy. But the relationships are just totally too unrealistic.
Think about this: if Millie is really such a horrible, negative, shallow, self-centered lazy *itch as she is portrayed to be, how realistic is it that Montag
1) wanted to marry her in the first place
and
2) wants to remain married to her - taking into consideration, also, the fact that they do not share beds, passion, thoughts, companionship, conversation, affection, children, - they share NOTHING besides the fact that they live in the same house. Honestly, which real human being would want to remain in such a cohabitation where the two participants obviously totally work on one another's nerves and value opposing lifestyles. (She likes loud music and fast cars - loud music and fast cars drives him crazy. She likes her wall-to-wall family- he abhors it; etc. )

Traveller wrote: "The war is just mentioned as a sort of aside for most of the book, and for most of the book, we have all this karfuffle about the bookburning and hound (what is the point of the hound in the overall development of the plot, anyway? Take out the hound and the story is still the same, so the hound is really just an added silliness), but actually, what the story appears to be about at THE END, is that the people ... well, what? There was a war that destroyed them all because people do not pay attention to history, is what he seems to be trying to say, but he does not say it very eloquently at all... I mean, one has no idea who the government is, and how the war came about, and if the man in the street could have had and/or would have had any say in the waging of this war... I mean, it's just all garbled and not sufficiently developed at all."

This to me was the heart of it. The city was bombed and I just sort of blinked for a second. We are told that none of this was a top-down kind of dystopia; it was a bottom-up kind of dystopia. But I think, in the kind of society he's painted, that any escalating conflict would be treated itself as a kind of entertainment. The total absence of the war from the narrative undermined the whole structure of the book. (How would Millie have reacted to the war reporting? What a wasted opportunity!)

Traveller wrote: "Well ray Bradbury, I get to rate, and it's not going to be pretty. >:( "
I love this! (Even as I continue to not care about Bradbury's stance on minorities.) Go, angry emoticon, go! Rate that book!

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "Traveller wrote: "Well ray Bradbury, I get to rate, and it's not going to be pretty. >:( "
I love this! (Even as I continue to not care about Bradbury's stance on minorities.) Go, angry emoticon, go! Rate that book! .."
Well - the thing is that he calls women minorities when actually we're not. That already shows me how skewed his thinking is- reducing us to a minority and lumping us together with orangutans just because it suits him...

LOL, I've been vacillating between a 1 star 2 star and 3 star since I read the last chapter - but the irritation started at the second section already. I think I'll do a review before I rate, but I have other books to catch up on. :)

Traveller wrote: "Well - the thing is that he calls women minorities when actually we're not."

True, but it seems to me that in the US there was a going thing there for a while to call women a minority due to oppression, and that may be where that came from.

For me, the book started great, went to a weird place where Beatty was the only worthy attraction, then ended pretty well. I went with 3 stars. Looking forward to your review. (I did mine with my 'inner child,' who actually turned out to be a much sharper reader than my 'adult' voice.)

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "Traveller wrote: "Well - the thing is that he calls women minorities when actually we're not."

True, but it seems to me that in the US there was a going thing there for a while to call women a min..."

Beatty also refers to white people (and the tobacco industry) in his lecture about minorities and objections to books. I think his use of the term “minorities�� is better understood as "special interests".

Bradbury's sexism I would call settled science. I think it's fair to discuss the failings of his female characters, but making the case about Bradbury himself is a bit of dead-horse flogging. See if you can find his appearance on "Politically Incorrect". I grew up loving Bradbury, and couldn't bring myself to read him for several years after seeing that.

Whitney wrote: "...I think his use of the term “minorities�� is better understood as "special interests". "

I agree with that.

From the previous topic:
Traveller wrote: "... Millie, who is little more than an empty automaton. She is a paper-thin character - yes, Bradbury intended for her to be this way, that much is clear, but in his endeavor to make her empty and soul-less, he also makes her unbelievable. ..."

As to the thinness of his characters, I feel like he gave us just enough to fill in the blanks ourselves. In a society like Fahrenheit 451 where no one is presented with difficult ideas, people drift into the path of least resistance. Mildred has never been encouraged to be anything but a passive and vacuous receptacle for entertainment, so that’s what she’s become. She, like so many others, is suicidal. She has a soul and an imagination, but it’s been neglected and discouraged to the point where her soul has been crushed and she’s not in the least consciously aware of it, let alone able to articulate it.

As for Montag, here’s a quote from the book: “Thought!�� he said. “Was I given a choice? My grandfather and father were firemen. In my sleep, I ran after them.�� Again, path of least resistance. He has enough curiosity left to take some of those books he’s burning, but isn’t sure what to do with them without a little guidance. As for how they got together, Montag and Mildred can’t remember how they met. To me, this hints of a time when they were both young and still vivacious, before their society had done its best to turn them into automatons.

Bradbury was primarily a writer of short stories rather than novels, and I think that’s reflected here in that the character’s histories are implied rather than spelled out.

Traveller wrote: "In Fahrenheit, there is nothing new, nothing interesting either technologically or in any other respect either..."

I’m going to directly challenge this point. Technology wasn’t his interest, I quoted him in a different discussion as saying ��"I don't try to describe the future, I try to prevent it". But as for his main themes, where are the examples of popular stories prior to 1953 that had already made the same points about the dangers of neglecting the imagination and avoiding things we find upsetting or challenging?

Bradbury's politics aside, I honestly did not find this a well-written book, for reasons mentioned which I shall gather up a bit more coherently and plunk out in the form of a review.

I've been wanting to mention also, that if this is supposed to be an anti-war war book, I found a book like Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut much better in this regard.

Also The Railway Man by Eric Lomax and The Reader by Bernhard Schlink . I must still get to All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.

Oh, and another book that Fahrenheit reminded me I still want to read, is Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.

Traveller wrote: "Oh, and another book that Fahrenheit reminded me I still want to read, is Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. ..."

That one's been lurking on my TBR for a long time as well.

Whitney wrote: "Traveller wrote: "In Fahrenheit, there is nothing new, nothing interesting either technologically or in any other respect either..."

I’m going to directly challenge this point. Technology wasn’t h..."

I shall take up the challenge, madame, and I shall return to the duelling ground before/by the end of the week with new ammunition, or with a white handkerchief, as the case might turn out to be. ;) (Just really need to catch up with other books for this group and another group where I'm committed.)

Oh, but yes, I had wanted to mention that I had read and enjoyed some of Bradbury's short stories. Much richer and more imaginative than this work, for the most part.

Traveller wrote: "Honestly, which real human being would want to remain in such a cohabitation where the two participants obviously totally work on one another's nerves and value opposing lifestyles."

Honestly? Quite a lot - and that's just thinking of those I know personally.
Very sad.

Whitney wrote: "I’m going to directly challenge this point. Technology wasn’t his interest, I quoted him in a different discussion as saying ��"I don't try to describe the future, I try to prevent it". But as for his main themes, where are the examples of popular stories prior to 1953 that had already made the same points about the dangers of neglecting the imagination and avoiding things we find upsetting or challenging? ..."

In fact, I could cite C.S Lewis right now off the top of my head, but I'd have to make sure exactly when he published what, since he was a contemporary of Bradbury's and come to think of it also shared some of his sentiments.
Actually, maybe even Lord Dunsany, but once again, I'll investigate properly and prepare my case before I return. :)
Well, actually Socrates definitely predates Bradbury, so maybe I'll take him.

Whitney wrote: "...Bradbury was primarily a writer of short stories rather than novels, and I think that’s reflected here in that the character’s histories are implied rather than spelled out."

I agree with you on that as well, and I am a lover of short stories, so from the opening, which a painting with language, I rather expected to enjoy this. Most of what did not work for me were due to issues that were spelled out.

- Montag was supposed to be waking up, but he was already hiding books, and then he mostly blundered through the action, endangering everyone he came into contact with without really reflecting on any of it until the river.

- I really do think Millie had the beginnings of something wonderful, and it's possible that in a different kind of narrative I would have been fine with her. As it was, I felt she was assigned the idiot role, and I didn't like it, mainly because I disagree that she had to be thin or crushed. I have known many Millie's in my life, and they are full of their own kinds of life and tragedy, and not necessarily just sleepwalkers.

-Clarissa. Just really did not work for me and I would have been happier if she had been written out of the story entirely. (Part of my reaction is anachronistic; you hit the nail on the head in the first thread when you mentioned the manic pixie dream girl. She exists to be special and wake Montag up. I found her mostly insufferable, and his interactions with her also served to highlight the fact that Montag was also written as special with no plausible reason why this should be so.)

- Beatty, though, I loved, and he broke my heart. Wonderful. So I disagree that the text had nothing interesting to offer in any other respect. I will respectfully stay out of the upcoming duel on Big Ideas :-)

Cecily wrote: "Honestly? Quite a lot - and that's just thinking of those I know personally.
Very sad. "

So, so true.

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "She exists to be special and wake Montag up. I found her mostly insufferable, and his interactions with her also served to highlight the fact that Montag was also written as special with no plausible reason why this should be so.)."

Yes, this. I love the "special' thing, Exactly, nail on the head. I don't mind special so much, as with Harry Potter, whom you expected to be special, because, you know, the scar on his head, and fantasy wish-fulfilment genre, etc. Like I said in an earlier post, we are given -some- of why Clarisse is special, though, -honestly- "because I was punished when I needed it" ??? Yuck.

But why is Montag special?

Traveller wrote: "hy Clarisse is special, though, -honestly- "because I was punished when I needed it" ??? Yuck...."

Yeah, my reaction to that one as well. You won't find me defending the Bradbury crotchety old man attitudes.

Well, actually Socrates definitely predates Bradbury, so maybe I'll take him.

There's no shortage of those complaining about how these kids today are lazy and won't amount to anything, I demand more of a defense!

I agree that Bradbury's short stories are superior, much more poetic. Montag did blunder and endanger people. He's in many ways like a teenager who has suddenly been made aware of the injustices of the world and rages almost incoherently.

Whitney wrote: "There's no shortage of those complaining about how these kids today are lazy and won't amount to anything, I demand more of a defense!..."

No worries, Madame Whitney, I shall honor thy challenge in due course, one way or t'other! ;) The weight of the challenge rests heavily upon my soul.

Whitney wrote: "He's in many ways like a teenager who has suddenly been made aware of the injustices of the world and rages almost incoherently."

A teenager, yes! That's the thing that has been bothering me. Thanks. I think we are on the same page, here.

Regarding the specialness, I just remembered something Huxley said years after writing Brave New World (and which my google-fu is not good enough to unearth right at the moment). He said he realized later that the Savage's immersion in Shakespeare was not enough to explain his difference. I wonder if Bradbury might not have faced some of the same problem here?

Incidentally, while trying to find the above info, I found this lovely quote on the Wikipedia page for BNW: "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one." -

It seems to me like Bradbury is pointing out a third possibility: a world where the majority does not want to read, and hates and fears those who do. I feel the ring of truth in some of that, even as I am critical of some of the presentation. I think the idea is there, but he didn't quite stick the landing.

Yes, certainly, I think many of his ideas are good, that's why I feel so frustrated at the garbled execution. I agree also with his sentiment that we should keep history in mind so that we can learn from it, though that is of course not a new idea.

To give him credit, I also liked this:

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted.

Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away."

(Though also not something new, it's still nice and worthy of remembering.)

We may be off a a slippery slope here. I'd be hard pressed to find any book where there wasn't some kind of precedent for the ideas expressed.

Whitney wrote: " I'd be hard pressed to find any book where there wasn't some kind of precedent for the ideas expressed."

...and fittingly, that dovetails with one of Bradbury's own sentiments- that we should preserve that which went before. And my gripe about that one, is that he wants to keep things (culture and technology and "human wisdom") static, that he doesn't want to let it evolve into new forms - he wants to just keep recycling the old exactly as it is, without letting culture and human wisdom evolve and adapt.

I think that's a valid point. You mentioned in the previous topic that Bradbury was writing before the internet, which is a more interactive technology than the television he criticizes in 451. Bradbury famously despised the internet and wouldn't go near it. And I recall his Martian societies as something of a recreation of small town America values at their best.

Traveller wrote: "Not to mention, that I found the whole oral tradition thing just as distracting to any potential central message. "

This is one of the most important books I've ever read, and the oral tradition part at the end shaped my concept of reading. I love the idea that once you've read a book, it becomes part of your thoughts, and that you can call it up when you need it. To me, that was a beautiful way to sum up Bradbury's main message that we should strive to enrich ourselves rather than be passively entertained.

I think the diatribes against "minorities" (Thanks for posting the quotes, by the way.) stem partly from this fear of people removing all the "dangerous" or controversial ideas from books until we have nothing left to think about. I am reminded of the censored edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that came out a few years ago or the censored versions of Shakespeare that I was assigned in High School.

I also think that the rants against special interests have a very self-defensive tone to them. The truth is that everyone except Anglo males were woefully underrepresented in SF not only during the 50s, but well into the late 1900s. No one likes to be criticized for that, and Bradbury is lashing out a bit rather than face reality.

I do have some sympathy for his point that people look at books too much through the representation filter. I follow the Newbery medal process each year, and I've noticed that the commentary has increasingly been about representation rather than substance. A stunning example is this review of Goodbye Stranger: which is supposedly a review of the entire book but only discusses one chapter in which an Indian marriage custom is described. The reviewer goes on and on about the prevalence of the custom in different regions, and whether it was fair to include it in the book, but never discusses the other 300 pages! I believe in accurate representation, but not to the exclusion of everything else.

Phil wrote: "Traveller wrote: "Not to mention, that I found the whole oral tradition thing just as distracting to any potential central message. "

This is one of the most important books I've ever read, and th..."

Thanks for that, Phil, and I hope you will excuse my feminist sentiments coming out a bit and bristling a bit at old Bradbury. :P

You do mention a very valid point, and one that some of the methods of social reform, such as affirmative action has brought to the fore. I've always thought of myself as a liberal, because I was an extremely rebellious child and young person, but as I am mellowing, I can also see some of the folly in certain liberal arguments and methodologies. I guess everything taken to it's extreme is not a good thing. PC-ness can be painful when taken to extremes, but that does not make it an entirely bad thing, as Bradbury tries to make it out.

Affirmative action, when run purely according to "quotas" is unfair, bad for economies and disciplines, and just plain silly, because you cannot try and forcibly shape your world according to demographics. Also, equality and fairness is not necessarily the same thing. And yet, forms of affirmative action can be a good thing when applied in a wise and "conservative" manner - for example, scholarships and special mentorships for minorities and classes of the disadvantaged.

I do not personally subscribe to utilitarianism. I feel one can be considerate towards minorities without taking it to a ridiculous extreme, but I still feel that Bradbury was celf-centered and insensitive. Yes, I agree that many of the things he said is ok, like for example, I agree that while one can strive from your own side to be polite, that the other side (minorities) don't have to be oversensitive to the point that, like you say, everything becomes bland and safe. Also, silly to try and make everything fair and equal and 'representative' because then indeed, things lose their uniqueness and everything becomes bland and uniform.

It's a bit like aspects of the censorship debate, for instance when we look at things like porn and child-porn.
I am the last person who would want to censor, but there are always special categories for everything - I personally do feel that exposing young children to depictions of violence and possibly worse, extreme sexual violence, can be traumatizing and can skew their outlook on life and society. ...so, while I am against censorship generally speaking, I also feel that there are exceptions, and there's a limit to everything and nothing is absolute. And there are two sides to everything, and the best thing is always to move a bit towards the middle of an extreme.

In short, one of my criticisms of Bradbury is that he works toward extremes; he is not prepared to compromise and find a middle ground. While he does have a point that over-PC-ness can become painful, I cannot see why people cannot strive to accommodate minorities at least to a reasonable degree. (For example, why hurt a black person's feelings unnecessarily by depicting them in a humiliating manner? I am not saying one should over-compensate to the other side, but also, there are certain bounds of common decency that it surely cannot hurt to remain within.)

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "Traveller wrote: "Well - the thing is that he calls women minorities when actually we're not."

True, but it seems to me that in the US there was a going thing there for a while to call women a min..."

I too remember that. I think it could have been due to women being treated as second class citizens, just like minorities.

On the other hand, I have just remembered my surprise when as a young teen I read that there were actually slightly more women in the world than men. "Really?" I remember thinking, "How could that be?" So terminology does matter.

Ruth wrote: "Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "Traveller wrote: "Well - the thing is that he calls women minorities when actually we're not."

True, but it seems to me that in the US there was a going thing there for a w..."

Yep, thanks for that. Indeed, calling the majority of the world's human population a minority, just shows how skewed those old patriarchists thinking really was. Whether it was fashion or not, it was a fashion that was denigrating towards the majority of human beings.

The fact that footbinding and FGM is/was also fashion once upon a time in a large % of the world's population, doesn't make the practice justifiable. The fact that it was once fashion to flog your slaves to keep them in line, doesn't make it a commendable act.