Saturday, January 2, 2016

Six often misunderstood SF/F novels

Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket/Gallery. He has published over thirty short stories as well. One of Somers's six often misunderstood SF/F novels, as shared at the B & N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

Any novel about state-sponsored book-burning is about censorship, except when it isn’t. The key to fully grasping this one lies in understanding what censorship is; like your First Amendment right to free speech, it’s easy to misunderstand. Censorship is when a government passes a law preventing you from saying something or expressing ideas. When your neighbors tell you to shut up about something, that’s not censorship. The true horror of Fahrenheit 451 isn’t that some awful government is burning books, but rather the much more terrible idea that society as a whole—your friends and neighbors—are allowing books to be burned because they find the ideas in them disturbing.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Fahrenheit 451 is on Alice-Azania Jarvis' reading list on firefighting.

--Marshal Zeringue