Ray Bradbury, the science fiction author, died last week. Bradbury was the genius who wrote Fahrenheit 451, in which an authoritarian state burns books because of their potential to encourage dissent. Instead, citizens are fed a diet of sanitized television. (The title refers to the heat at which paper burns.) Bradbury himself said the novel was less about censorship than about the prospect of a world without books, in which intelligence and attentions spans had declined so far that people were only capable of digesting information in simplified chunks.
Bradbury lived long enough to see a world in which books had begun to disappear - but were replaced by their digital likenesses. Apparently he resisted the rise of e-books and disliked his own novels being published in that format. Paper books were irreplaceable to Bradbury, who could not afford them when he was a child in Depression-era America, and so spent a great deal of time at the library. He once wrote: «The library fuelled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt... I discovered that the library is the real school.» But Bradbury was too harsh on the digital world. The dinosaurs and Egyptians are still out there, and my son will be able to find out all about them - at the click of a mouse. As I've said before, the future never quite works out the way science fiction writers plan.
