February’s Big Read in Missouri has selected a surprising novel–Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I should not assume everyone today has read it, so briefly it is a novel about a future in which it is illegal to read books. The fire department, because all houses are built of fireproof materials, no longer puts out fires, but burns books when it finds hidden caches. A fairly decent film was made of it in the Sixties. The reasoning behind this future is the eventual, clinical “rationalization” of history by a technocratic elite who have decided that fiction–and dreams–are inimical to peace and productivity and happiness. The scientific age did this, with its hyper rationality and impatience with anything that cannot be measured or controlled. It is a parable much of its times–the Fifties–and a terrifying landscape to anyone with half a brain and an ounce of independence.

But…

Ray Bradbury got it wrong, but when I first read Fahrenheit 451 I believed him. He scared me to the core with that book. That and the related stories, like The Exiles and Usher II , chilled me and set me on schemes of hiding my books from the sterile-suited, cold-eyed rationalists bent on doing me good for my own sake. Scared me terrifically, but in the end he got it wrong.

I was eleven when I read both 451 and The Martian Chronicles. I was in parochial school, among people ready to protect me with great spiritual warmth from a world that seemed determined to do away with God. Somehow in that strange time in the middle to late Sixties, communism and science had gotten entwined. It’s clear now. Most of the sf films of the Fifties and Sixties depicted the scientist as an emotionless drudge, all consumed with reason and facts. Communists were likewise shown to be people who would sacrifice their parents in the name of the state, the collective, the greater good of the proletariat. There was no room for love or faith or kindness. It was an aesthetic alliance, a tone and pervasive comparison that we just took for granted. We were children, we didn’t know.

And most didn’t care. There was baseball and muscle cars, rock’n’roll and miniskirts, and Johnson, whose Texan drawl was anything but literate and scientific, was going to make the country povertyless and free. Science was going to moon, not learning how think. Communism was “over there” in rice paddies and Red Square and the quickest way to get a punch in the eye was to call somebody a “Commie.”

But I was reading these stories of how in the name of the orderly society all the books were going to be collected and burned and it was going to be the scientists–the rationalists– who were going to do it. After all, it wasn’t rational to believe in alternate worlds or aliens or ghosts or Atlantis (even though archaeologists were searching, but they weren’t after all scientists–were they?–scientists worked in laboratories and wore white smocks…); it wasn’t rational to dream about John Carter or Tarzan, pretend to be Horatio Hornblower or James Bond; it wasn’t rational to prefer reading fantasies about other stars rather than textbooks about them.

Was it?

I wasn’t sure. Even while I made preparations, hidey-holes in which to squirrel away my books, something nagged me about the whole premise. For one thing, while I was reading Bradbury, I was also reading Clarke.

The thing about Arthur C. Clarke, especially at that age, is the impossibility of coming away without a sense of his profound faith that science–Reason–will give us the stars. And everything else in between. Clarke’s work shares a pervasive confidence–not loud and splashy, but quietly insistent, just there in the background–that the true spirituality of humanity is expressed in its ability to solve problems and realize dreams.

Wait a minute. Dreams? But scientists aren’t dreamers, are they? I mean, the books I love, the novels and stories, they’re dreams on paper, made living by the reading…they aren’t rational. They won’t solve problems or give us the stars…will they? The scientists will burn them…won’t they?

Like most things at that age, obsessions come and go. I recovered from my fright. I didn’t think about it for a long time, until I ran into committees organized to pull books from library shelves, people who published lists of banned books, boycotts against bookstores designed to get rid of certain books. Then all the fear Bradbury had evoked in me as a child came back, full force.

But they weren’t scientists. Or communists.

They were people who believed in ghosts. People who believed in devils and plots with communists. People who were afraid of scientists. People who, if they read books at all, only read the books they are told to read by those who make promises they cannot deliver.

Bradbury got it wrong. Partly, at least. The book burners don’t know anything about science, nor do they want to. If they win they will not be clean, sterile technocrats. They won’t be burning the Bible along with Narnia and the Galactic Empire. They won’t go to Mars. They won’t go anywhere. Science is a dream, too.

Clarke understood.

I’m glad I read them both.