Bradbury, who died aged 91 in 2012, said his novel was an expansion of ideas found in his 1949 short story, The Pedestrian, which was inspired by a late-night encounter with a police officer:
“I had been accosted by the police one night while I walked in Los Angeles with a friend. The police wanted to know what we were doing, when walking was our aim and talking occupied us.”
First published in 1953, the dystopian sci-fi has won multiple awards, been adapted for film, TV, theatre and radio, and finally gets to be sworn about and puzzled over by these two idiots for Episode 3 of The Dabblers’ Book Club.
Publisher’s Blurb
The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen.
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
The classic novel of a post-literate future, `Fahrenheit 451′ stands alongside Orwell’s `1984′ and Huxley’s `Brave New World’ as a prophetic account of Western civilization’s enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity. Bradbury’s powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which over fifty years from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.
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Notes from Hajar: Apparently there is a recent Fahrenheit 451 film out…
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