Orwell's work beside 1984 is better (in the sense of more complex/relevant to our time, not as entertaining.) In particular, his writing on the Spanish Civil War has seemed relevant today: "I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that…
While I am fine with the social conventions that hold spoiling recent works as anathema, or even older works within limited contexts (for instance, /r/WoT tries to allow readers to talk about the early books without instantly being spoiled for the later ones), the absurd demands people make to not "spoil" any book or movie people still read or watch recreationally -- and not just as a homework assignment -- is harmful. The metaphors, the concepts, the philosophies expressed in books, even trashy 1960's SF, are important. They are tools we can use to explain, to convince, to argue, to…
The attention-sucking and vapidity is independent of the media it's derived from. As long as it's 'pushed' information it doesn't matter if the information comes from a train radio or through the internet. I don't see much of a difference between the Denham's Dentriface section and the constant pinging of attention our phones (and others' phones) request from us. We have access to nearly unlimited information, but even then, I don't think most internet users are using it to exchange great works of thought or even 'surfing' as the internet was intended to be used. Instead we have these…
I read Fahrenheit 451 again a month ago and it was much more relatable than the first time I read it. The pattern of going from point A to B and being told to do that by someone or something as quickly as possible is the norm. If you have a demanding job and a family at the end of most days it’s easy to tune out and only have the desire to feel comfortable. You’ve been exhausting yourself to be ‘accepted’ by society. Thinking for yourself and finding moments to do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted was dangerous in Fahrenheit 451. I think that is becoming very real nowadays. If you…
> After witnessing war, authors grew particularly concerned with totalitarian governments’ ability to regulate the arts. One of the most popular examples continues to be Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which breathes into awfully vivid life the possibility of a future in which books are burned. This paragraph is a common misinterpretation. Ray Bradbury wasn't writing about the dangers of government control or censorship... Those things were consequential and not causal. He viewed the 'firemen' depicted in his novel as a side effect of shallow television pervading culture and destroying any…
> Never heard of this writer [...] before. Oh my. Wow. That's... huge for you. How exciting! He's famous enough that IIRC The Simpsons once made a joke about "The ABCs of Science Fiction" where the gag was that the really nerdy kid (I'm forgetting his name—not Millhouse, the other one who wasn't as prominent a character) subverted it by swapping the usual "Bradbury" for "Bester"—as in Alfred Bester, another very-well-regarded author who's not nearly as well-known outside of sci-fi as Bradbury is. Bradbury's one of those rare crossover authors who also gets claimed by the "literary" side of…
If I'm understanding correctly, you're postulating that there is a general preference in the dystopian-category reading material selected by schools, towards "bleak" novels in which resistance proves futile. Moreover, this is on some level a conscious decision by the education establishment to encourage children to play by the rules at school. Is that fair? This isn't a hypothesis I've come across before. On reflection I firmly disagree with it, but it's an interesting claim and worth discussing. The main problem I have is that there is a much simpler explanation for why schools choose the…
"The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws. Montag slid…
It is built in. But since we learned writing and reading, we're underutilizing it, so it's decaying. Plato, putting words in the mouth of Socrates in Phaedrus wrote: ...for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus#On_the_decline_of_Gre.... Chess players can play without the chess board. Some writers prisonners wrote books in their head. Similarly, if you were separated from your…
There's some interesting threads here. I do understand the conversation around free speech and censorship has been top of mind lately, but IMO a lot of the comments here are getting carried away and missing a point that is crucial in this instance: these are children's books. As much as I disagree with book-burning and support not only free speech, but also the healthy debate around what it constitutes, I think all of that is rather unrelated to this specific article. Children don't have the same context or critical capacity to decide if a view is good or not. If a child encounters some…