Of all the dystopias I read as a teen I think Fahrenheit 451 is the flimsiest thematically but the prose more than makes up for it
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Like taken literally the idea of making it illegal to read poetry or whatever is extremely dumb but the book-burning imagery is indelible
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Replying to @arthur_affect
"Fire is bright, fire is clean" as visual metaphor for the insistent ravenous pace of modern mass media, the constant yammering Now of news
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Replying to @arthur_affect
On that level it's if anything much more relevant today than when written, even if the core metaphor of mass illiteracy is now outdated
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Replying to @arthur_affect
I feel like F451 hits on that middle ground between Brave New World and 1984 - we won't be kept in immiseration nor drugged into a haze
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Replying to @arthur_affect
It hit a theme of the cyberpunk dystopias that followed it -- we'll be BUSY. We'll be TIRED. The problem w the future is just too much shit
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Before it became a trope of 1980s cyberpunk Bradbury hit that theme of dystopia just through inescapable goddamn commercials
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Montag trying to read "Consider the lilies" but the Denham's Dentifrice jingle is in his head is so on-the-nose but so good
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Bradbury's after the fact reveal that Fire Chief Beatty is an embittered classicist who's fully embraced the nihilism of modernity is great
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It's the most newly relevant element of the story. There's a dozen Fire Chief Beattys working in New Media rn
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Replying to @arthur_affect
There's something very dark and very Internet era about Beatty having a secret sealed library in his home
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Replying to @arthur_affect
It's all legal bc he owns them but never reads them. He has no need to -- "I've read them all, I know what they say, they've got no answers"
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