Ray Bradbury (1920–2012)

A post-nuclear tale published in 1950 that predicts the fully automated house still being promised us through the so-called Internet of Things. Today, we perhaps might hear Alexa's voice.

The house lives on after the instant immolation of the inhabitants represented ultimately by the monument of their burned shadows on what will be the only part of the house to survive at the end of the story. Even the dog is dead.

But the reason for reading it is the elegiac tone. Bradbury builds the story show more around a few lines of a poem written long before the possibility of nuclear war but predictive of the same reality that continues today at Chernobyl where trees still grow but humans don't live.

He really lets himself flow into what turns into a sort of extended prose poem about mechanisms that act as ghosts of humanity, mindlessly following routines until accident and entropy no longer permit them to follow what had become daily rituals as the system collapses.

The idea of technology surviving as the pale shadow of lost human life before it too is no longer able to function would have been sad enough nearly seventy years ago. Perhaps it is even sadder now when we contemplate the ghost lives that will survive us on the internet. show less

I first picked this up at 18 and was so bored I took it back to the library. I had been reading classics voraciously that summer along with PBS's The Great American Read program, and thought this would be an easy thing to tick off the list. Oops. I picked it up again at 23 and understood immediately why I'd returned it. But I continued on, and I'm proud of myself, but... Ugh.

So... I think I'm too old for this. I have a feeling my reaction to this book was like when someone over the age of 17 show more reads The Catcher in the Rye--It feels way too juvenile for serious thought.

I don't exactly know what happened here. I think this book suffers from what I call the "H.G. Wells Issue", where the idea of the text is so groundbreaking it somehow transcends the outdated-ness of the prose. The text here isn't dry like Wells', thank god, and the ideas are revolutionary for its time (it does have something to say for the public that first picked these pages up), but man, it has aged like bad wine. Not in sensibilities, but in naivety. Perhaps this is why the book is so overwhelmingly taught to middle and high schoolers--it's a simple book with themes trying to crack open your skull every paragraph. It doesn't have room for any nuance, and it makes its view of the world very clear. Is my distaste just because I have no palate for Sci-Fi? You can just tell it was written in 9 days, and that is in no way a compliment. It read like a first draft published way too soon because the author was established enough to get away with it.

Which leads me to my last, and the most petty point, is that I just don't like 20th-century "men's fiction". You know the type. I'm glad it exists (woe be male readers in today's XX litfic zeitgeist), and some of it can be quite beautiful, but as a taste of mine it generally reads as too naive, self-aggrandizing, and chauvinistic. If it has something relevant to say I don't mind as much, but unfortunately this book is a time capsule of Red Scare, Cold War, and post-war Capitalist neuroses. We are all far too jaded for this threat to mean anything anymore.

Oh well. It wasn't the worst thing ever. There is a real prosody I found and devoured in its pages, but I am glad it's off my list. show less

“It was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.”

Tense and compelling, Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Long Rain, is one of the finest among his Mars and Venus stories. It is rich with atmosphere, as four soldiers who have crash landed on Venus, killing two others who had been with them, attempt to survive the constant rains of Venus, and make it through the jungle to the Sun Dome, and safety. Much like in the silent film, The Wind, starring Lillian Gish, Bradbury writes the show more rains of Venus as a force of nature that can drive men mad.

It becomes a war of attrition against the elements, as one by one the rain claims members of the small party. Their only desire is to escape the rain, to sit and read and drink cocoa and coffee in the warmth of the Sun Dome. Hindered by an electrical storm more like a living thing attacking them than a natural phenomenon, they reach the nearest Sun Dome only to discover the sea-dwelling Venusians have attacked it. The only hope remaining is if this tired, weary, and dwindling group can survive reaching the next nearest Sun Dome…

Bradbury’s description of the rains and the effect it has on the men is marvelous, making the trek for the reader both tense and involving. Will they reach the second Sun Dome only to discover it too has been damaged beyond repair by the Venusians? Or will the constant, torrential rains pick them off one by one, as they give themselves over to something more powerful than themselves?

A masterpiece from the mind of Ray Bradbury that anyone who loves Science Fiction should read at some point. Highly recommended. show less

I read this for the first time since high school, and I was continually amazed at what I had missed at that point. I knew how important this book was as a dystopian depiction of what can happen in a society without books, but it was far richer than I imagined in details that paint how dreary Montag's life had become. Clarisse is a brilliant foil to Montag in the early stages of the book, and her appearance serves as an excellent juxtaposition to Mildred. I enjoyed how Montag was a flawed show more protagonist who was both rash in his decision making and self-aware of his shortcomings that resulted from his longtime ignorance. The contrast between Montag, a non-reader, and Beatty and Faber, who were both clearly well-read, was stark. The book was rife with irony, perhaps none more cutting than the fire chief clearly being well-read and articulate. However, as Montag recognized his unhappiness with his own life, he very much acted on his own intentions and was not influenced by Beatty any longer.

The role of the media in this book is a metaphor that felt much more salient today than ten years ago. Mildred, along with many other characters, constantly being tapped into programming that's devoid of substance was reminiscent of doomscrolling that is so common with the advent of short form video content. This feels even more significant when nearly every social media platform rushed to copy the model that TikTok pioneered. To me, this is an important reminder of how easily we can get wrapped up in these forms of media at the expense of books. Really, books are just one of many media that challenge us and require critical thinking. I found it to be particularly important how much of this media was altered, as well. When Montag brought a real bible back to Faber, Faber marveled at the details that no longer existed in the parlor depictions of the bible. This all culminated in the coverage of the chase for Montag after his crime, which is very much sensationalized and must end with capturing someone, even though they have lost Montag. This underscores how vital these media are in controlling and subduing the population in the face of a society that is fundamentally flawed.

Above all else, I loved how fire was depicted throughout the book. Man has an inherent connection to fire, and the continued appearance of fire in different contexts reminded me of this Blood Meridian quote: "The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be." I found multiple ideas from this quote to be salient: fire as a living being, men being less without fire, and all fires being connected. Fire is personified throughout this novel, as it has taken on a central role in this future society and is the means of destruction. I think that the association between men and fire is also established from the very beginning: "It was a pleasure to burn." Beyond the satisfaction that the firemen take in doing their job are the physical marks that it has left on them from years of burning. Even when they are not actively burning, the fire stays with them in the form of rosy cheeks and the odor of kerosine. Finally, I think that the connection between all fires is significant in this novel, particularly once Montag encounters fire outside of the context of destruction. He sees the fire in the forest and recognizes it as simply being warm, not hot, and how comforting that is. I think that the fundamental connection here between the fires of his job and this campfire represents the difference in the attitudes of these men compared with people who live in the cities. Being under the authority of the state in the city, each person is complicit in the destruction of books, knowledge, and noncompliance. On the other hand, these men who live in exile carry this knowledge rather than destroy it, and maintain fires for warmth and comfort rather than destruction.

I enjoyed one of the most central messages at the end of the book, that was repeated multiple times by Granger: "you are not important." Despite the important role that this group is taking on collectively of remembering a great body of literature, there is a strong emphasis on the fact that no individual among them assumes a greater significance. It is simply an important component of being human to remember the important stories that precede our time so that we may draw upon their important lessons. This to me is reminiscent of a quote I heard yesterday in a webinar: "humanity is the sum total of all of the arguments that we have accepted or rejected until this point." This is something that must be done on a societal level, and the role of each individual is to remember a component of this sum so that we may maintain and build upon our collective humanity over time.

Ultimately, this is a brilliant book that includes a great deal of important social commentary and underscores the importance of books as a means of carrying our humanity forward. show less