Fahrenheit 451 Teresa Sutton

Videos Bradbury on writing Fahrenheit 451 (8.00) “The Pedestrian” (5.00) “There Will Come Soft Rain” (2.59)

“Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.” This is the line Montag accidentally reads. This is the first book he steals. This prompts him to think.

“Ray Bradbury, a master of science fiction whose imaginative and lyrical evocations of the future reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of his own postwar America, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 91.” …represent science and technology as a mixed bag of blessings and abominations From Ray Bradbury’s obituary in the New York Times, June 6, 2012

imaginative and lyrical evocations of the future

He described his method of composition as “word association,” often triggered by a favorite line of poetry.

reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of his own postwar America

8 million copies 36 different languages

The Science Fiction of the novel Fahrenheit 451: The burning point of books Utopian/Dystopian Fiction “The Pedestrian” “There Will Come Soft Rains”

“The Pedestrian” Walking is a crime One police car patrols 2 million citizens because everyone is inside watching TV

A company called Scarab has invented an unmanned police car that catches speeders

Here's an "innovation" we hope will remain a design concept: the Scarab Chase Assistant is an electric semi-autonomous police vehicle. When a speeder zips by, a cop electronically tags that car with radar, and then sends the Scarab scurrying after it. What does this little RoboCop do when it catches up to the speeder? Well, it doesn't bark out, "Put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply." When this technology first rolls out, it will merely attempt to peacefully convince suspects to pull over to the side of the road the way a normal cop car would. Down the road, its designer foresees using electromagnetic pulse or signal jamming equipment that could force a fleeing vehicle to stop. Or hey, the cop-bot could just use GM's OnStar system that can remotely stop a vehicle now.

“There Will Come Soft Rains” Smart House Automated clean-up Monitoring for intruders Monitoring for fires and extinguishing them Keeping track of schedules for family members

Smart houses…not just for Bill Gates anymore…

The Science Fiction of Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury’s biographer confirmed that Bradbury’s process was simply to think about something current (televisions) and project where it might go wrong in the future… …He was dead on accurate…

The Electric Eye Snake Stomach Pump In the not-too-distant future imagined by Bradbury in the novel, accidental suicide by ingestion of freely available tranquilizers and other drugs is so common that machines are created to deal with it. Mildred’s overdose: “They had this machine. [It] slid down into your stomach like a black cobra down an echoing well looking for all the old water and the old time gathered there... Did it suck out all of poisons accumulated with the years? It fed in silence with an occasional sound of inner suffocation and blind searching... The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one's yard. “

world-for-the-new-man-2/

Here's another description: “He tried to count how many times she swallowed and he thought of the visit from the two zinc-oxide-faced men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths and the electronic-eyed snake winding down into the layer upon layer of night and stone and stagnant spring water, and he wanted to call out to her, how many have you taken tonight?”

Today, 2014 Stomach Pump

Mechanical Hound with its poisonous needle nose that is capable of tracking down traitors who dare to own books Shara-Moonglow art/Mechanical-Hound-F

$98.95 $44.95 (sings and dances)

Seashells in the Ears

Room Mice

Couldn’t find a picture of a room with four walls covered in television screens, but looks like we’re getting close…

The Big Questions Has television destroyed interest in reading? Is this analogous to book burning?