http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-ray-bradbury-20120607,0,5622415.story
QuoteAuthor of more than 27 novels and story collectionsâ€"most famously "The Martian Chronicles," "Fahrenheit 451," "Dandelion Wine" and "Something Wicked This Way Comes"â€"and more than 600 short stories, Bradbury has frequently been credited with elevating the often-maligned reputation of science fiction. Some say he singlehandedly helped to move the genre into the realm of literature.
A short excerpt from Fahrenheit 451
QuoteAn excerpt from Ray Bradbury's novel "Fahrenheit 451," copyright © 1953, renewed 1981 by Ray Bradbury. The passage describes Montag and the other firefighters hunting down books and burning them.
Have reason to suspect attack; 11 No. Elm, City. E.B.
"That would be Mrs. Blake, my neighbor," said the woman, reading the initials.
"All right, men, let's get them!"
Next thing they were up in musty blackness swinging silver hatchets at doors that were, after all, unlocked, tumbling through like boys all rollick and shout. "Hey!" A fountain of books sprang down upon Montag as he climbed shuddering up the sheer stairwell. How inconvenient! Always before it had been like snuffing a candle. The police went first and adhesive-taped the victim's mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you found an empty house. You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since things really couldn't be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don't scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Everything to its proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who's got a match!
But now, tonight, someone had slipped. This woman was spoiling the ritual. The men were making too much noise, laughing, joking to cover her terrible accusing silence below. She made the empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a fine dust of guilt that was sucking in their nostrils as they plunged about. It was neither cricket nor correct. Montag felt an immense irritation. She shouldn't be here, on top of everything!
Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face. A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the dim, wavering light, a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, the words delicately painted thereon. In all the rush and fervor, Montag had only an instant to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as if stamped there with fiery steel. "Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine." He dropped the book. Immediately, another fell into his arms.
"Montag, up here!"
Montag's hand closed like a mouth, crushed the book with wild devotion, with an insanity of mindlessness to his chest. The men above were hurling shovelfuls of magazines into the dusty air. They fell like slaughtered birds and the woman stood below, like a small girl, among the bodies.
I'll never forget when I submitted "It was a pleasure to burn" to be my high school senior yearbook quote. Of course, they didn't publish it, so I had a blank under my picture. Bastards.
I will have to dust off some old books that I have not read in a very long time. Perhaps I posted this in the wrong section... as Bradbury was not really a science fiction writer... simply an awesome writer.
From Illustrated Man...
QuoteMy tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M. So as not to be dead.
Ray Bradbury's Vision of the Dystopian CityIn 1951, the late, great Ray Bradbury published a short story titled "The Pedestrian." In it, we encounter a character named Leonard Mead doing something very odd in his future society: walking. The year is 2053 and in his city of 3 million, the streets are quiet, "not unequal to walking through a graveyard." Foreshadowing themes that would later turn up in Bradbury's most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451, we get the sense that Mead's fellow urbanites are busy watching TV. "Was that a murmur of laughter from within a moon-white house?" the protagonist asks as he passes the homes of his neighbors.
But Mead loved to walk, even though "in ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not once in all that time." We quickly find out why:
QuoteHe came to a cloverleaf intersection which stood silent where two main highways crossed the town. During the day it was a thunderous surge of cars, the gas stations open, a great insect rustling and a ceaseless jockeying for position as the scarabbeetles, a faint incense puttering from their exhausts, skimmed homeward to the far directions.
A lone car quickly approaches him. It's a police officer. It's a rare sight, we're told â€" there's only one police car left in the city where crime was "ebbing" â€" but so too is Mead. The police officer asks Mead:
Quote"What are you doing out?"
"Walking," said Leonard Mead.
"Walking!"
"Just walking," he said simply, but his face felt cold.
"Walking, just walking, walking?"
"Yes, sir."
"Walking where? For what?"
"Walking for air. Walking to see."
"Your address!"
"Eleven South Saint James Street."
"And there is air in your house, you have an air conditioner, Mr. Mead?"
"Yes."
"And you have a viewing screen in your house to see with?"
"No."
"No?"
There was a crackling quiet that in itself was an accusation.
"Are you married, Mr. Mead?"
"No."
"Not married," said the police voice behind the fiery beam, The moon was high and clear among the stars and the houses were gray and silent.
"Nobody wanted me," said Leonard Mead with a smile.
"Don't speak unless you're spoken to!"
Leonard Mead waited in the cold night.
"Just walking, Mr. Mead?"
"Yes.""But you haven't explained for what purpose."
"I explained; for air, and to see, and just to walk."
"Have you done this often?"
"Every night for years."
The police car sat in the center of the street with its radio throat faintly humming.
"Well, Mr. Mead," it said.
"Is that all?" he asked politely.
"Yes," said the voice. "Here." There was a sigh, a pop. The back door of the police car sprang wide. "Get in."
When Bradbury was writing this story, America's view of cities was already moving away from one where you could walk to all the places you needed to go to one where the automobile was becoming supreme. Streetcar tracks were being torn out and more roads were built to accommodate cars. Mass construction of single family homes in suburbs had taken off. Bradbury, clearly, had reservations about this trajectory. He saw a future for the city that wasn't as rosy as the advertisements of his day made them out to be. He saw a future in which the automobile would disconnect us from humanity, where walking would be considered a crime.
While strides have been made in cities to become more walkable, pedestrian-friendly, and the like, much of America now lives in a society that treats lonely pedestrians like Leonard Mead. We've seen it in national news just this year, when Trayvon Martin was shot and killed after being seen as a threat because he was walking alone through a gated community. Or last year when Raquel Nelson, a 30-year-old mother, was convicted of vehicular homicide when her four-year-old son was hit by a car and killed during their attempt to cross a busy street. She faced more jail time than the driver who fled the scene. As David Goldberg of Transportation for America put it, this case “is emblematic of a bigger problem that exists in metro Atlanta and across the country. A case like this puts in stark relief the dangerous designs that exist out there in communities across the country."
Bradbury couldn't have known to what extent his vision of the city would play out when he was writing this story in the 1950s, but not surprisingly he was spot on about the consequences of building cities around cars instead of people.
RIP Ray Bradbury, the master of foresight.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/06/ray-bradburys-vision-dystopian-city/2199/