The revered science fiction, horror and mystery writer Ray Bradbury has died aged 91. He was best known for Fahrenheit 451, his blockbuster of 1953. He became known as a curmudgeon, and was something of a Luddite. He was a virulent opponent of the internet, which he viewed as a transient nonsense, doomed to fail. He refused to allow his books to be sold in digital editions, a stance which was curtailed last year when his publishers made it a condition of his contract.
His recalcitrance was perhaps borne of his love of the printed book and of old fashioned libraries. He maintained that libraries were one of the few places that children and adults could ‘meet people’ (in the pages of books). But there was also a clear political dimension to his position, as revealed in the film above. He says (2.38 mins):
‘We should learn from history about the destruction of books. When I was 15-years-old, Hitler burned books in the streets. So I learned then about dangerous it all was because if you didn’t have books and the ability to read you couldn’t be part of a civilization, you couldn’t be part of a democracy. If you know how to read, then you have a complete education in life, you know how to think. You know how to vote. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country: we are a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.’
Bradbury’s point extends from the obvious perils of censorship to the more opaque dangers posed by people who are not educated to think for themselves. The rest of the video gives the uninitiated a taste of what Bradbury was like as a man and his habits as a writer. As the golfer Gary Player once memorably remarked, ‘The more I practice, the luckier I get.’ The same was true of Bradbury, who wrote every day of his life from adolescence.
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