Fahrenheit 451

FAHRENHEIT 451: THE TEMPERATURE AT WHICH BOOK PAPER CATCHES FIRE AND BURNS.

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.

Fahrenheit 451 is the classic novel of a post-literature future. It stands alongside Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilisation's enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity. Ray Bradbury's vision is astonishingly prophetic: wall-sized television screens showing interactive soap operas; billboards two hundred feet long, so that speeding drivers can make sense of them; a populace oblivious of everything but the constant music and news delivered by miniature speakers plugged into their ears.

Bradbury's powerful and poetic prose combines with an uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which, forty years on from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.

Prescribed text for NSW Syllabus EAL/D: HSC 2027-2030.