Science fiction is—at least partially—about guessing what the future might look like and then writing something entertaining about it. No one reading these extrapolations truly expects that the author will get it totally right. These are educated guesses, based on how things appear at the moment, and writers of the genre, whether great powerhouses like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, or the many lesser-known bricklayers, rarely get it even close to right. And yet here's the thing: sometimes they do.
Most well-known of the science fiction futurists who got things almost too right is H.G. Wells. In his 1908 story The War in the Air, Wells accurately describes world powers developing fleets of flying machines to build military supremacy and bomb cities. He eerily predicted the Battle of Britain well before flying machines were more than a breathless speculation. So accurate were his guesses (three years before Orville and Wilbur closed the bike shop) that science fiction fans often commented that Wells may have had a real time machine and used it.
Perhaps taking a page from Wells is another author who so closely guessed the nature of modernity that to read his collection of novels and short stories now is to wonder if he borrowed his predecessor's time traveling chair. Ray Bradbury, beloved author of such classics as Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, and The Illustrated Man, is a name that has become a byword for dystopian visions of totalitarian futures, planetary settlement, and censorship. The last two on that list have convinced me that Bradbury was no mere author. He was a prophet of Old Testament proportions. He seemed to know what the world would hold as he looked forward, and his tales are shockingly close to reality.
His masterpiece on book burning, Fahrenheit 451, is an incredible story of a future where technology has run rampant, people wish to live in ignorance, and books are the most deadly contraband imaginable. Here is Guy Montag, a fireman whose job it is not to put fires out, but to start them. If a person's home is suspected of containing books, Montag and his firemen go to that house and burn it. The houses are fireproof; only the books—and the people who have hoarded them—burn.
Montag's world is a place of futuristic technologies and mechanisms, but our modern moment, with a few negligible (and perhaps inevitable) differences. Montag's wife has become more and more aloof. Their house has a room where she can meet with friends from all over, broadcast on their walls. She is constantly listening in on dramas or interacting with people from elsewhere. She spends most of her time with “seashells buzzing like wasps” in her ears, even at night when she should be sleeping. How clear a vision of social media and earbuds does one need?
Because of her continued use of these technologies, she has become depressed, unable to sleep without pills; she is a wreck, continuously needing a fix from her fake friends. As she fades, Montag understands that she has become addicted not just to her sleeping aids, but to the constant sauté of electronic entertainment. As people turn toward technology, they become anxious, restless, unable to connect with other people, causing, as Montag sees it, a crisis of connectivity, purpose, meaning, and sense of usefulness.
Along the highways of the future, too, Montag witnesses self-driving cars, which people push to immense speeds, sometimes dying in horrible crashes as a result. Relieved of the requirement of carefully handling a vehicle, the “beetles” in Montag's future take on the role of the driver and so remove the need for care or caution or personal responsibility. Motorists drink and go driving with no thought of themselves or others.
Finally, there are the spider-like mechanical hounds: eight-legged “sniffers” that the firemen use to spy and search out books in people's homes. Ominous nods at semi-sentient technology that has gone rogue, these robotic assassins surveil constantly on the populace and bring back information to the firemen. The hounds can inject anesthetics or poisons as needed, and once a hound is on your trail, there is no way to shake it.
This may seem the most far-fetched aspect of Bradbury’s dystopian future, but actually, it is quite accurate. While the hounds and firemen of Montag's reality are a metaphor for a rabid hate of reading and books, Bradbury knew something about book banning and censorship even in his own modern moment. His novel was—and I'm sure you will catch the irony, not to say hypocrisy here—almost continuously challenged, faced several removals, and was even subjected to a rewrite (called the Bal-Hi version), which removed references to drug use, swearing, and violence. In one complaint about the novel, would-be banners hated a scene in which the Bible was burned (but were okay with other books going to the torch?), somehow missing the author's point altogether. Bradbury hadn't missed the point, though.
As I write this, rabid gangs of intellectually stunted mammals are trying to pass legislation that will give politically packed school boards in North Carolina the right to “pick books,” totally ignoring that school librarians are specially educated and trained to do this task. Other groups, always tiny but loud, are trying to get their own people on public library trustee boards to wreak havoc so that books teaching about history, diversity, LGBTQ+ topics, the Civil War, and the Holocaust cannot be purchased or put on shelves. People are being persecuted, fired, and ruined because they provide certain books. Spies are being hired into the school or library org charts to rat out the details of collections. Bradbury’s crystal ball showed firemen doing this, but the maniacs who want to ban books today are, in a sense, torching our right to read and ruining people's lives in the same way.
In the compilation of short stories called The Illustrated Man, Bradbury envisions a future that is both dark and terrifyingly accurate. In “Kaleidoscope,” a rocket is cut open by a meteor and sends the astronauts inside flailing out into space. Their dying radio chatter betrays their cutthroat ambitions and manipulations until they all plummet out of range. Looking up at the explosion, a little boy dreams about flying rockets one day. In one tale, wealthy parents wonder that their spoiled children's artificially intelligent nursery has come alive as a scene from the African veldt and slowly begin to sense that the lions in the room are terrifyingly real.
My favorite of the series is “The Rocket,” in which an impoverished junkyard owner saves for years to send one of his family to Mars via rocket. However, each of the family cannot bear to go without the rest, and so no one opts to take the trip. In a feat of filial piety and generosity, the father buys a prototype rocket and fits it with screens and motors, and though it never leaves the earth, takes his family on a wonderful trip using their imaginations.
Bradbury’s prose is curt, steely, even brusque, but poetic at the same time. He captures the reader's imagination with intense flashes of descriptions of rockets and forbidding technology and then balances it all with clipped, straightforward dialogue that imitates the materialistic and sometimes fretful ideologies that he holds in critical apposition with his own era.
People in his stories are seldom truly happy. Something is always missing. They are motivated by the desire for wealth or notoriety, rather than discovery or scientific research. They live in pinched societies, wedged against technologies that have tyrannical tendencies and corporations that treat all but the most wealthy as peasants.
There are smart homes, rocket ships, universal surveillance, super-rich villains, egomaniacal leaders, vicious and psychopathic children, overwhelmed alien invaders, ghosts of how things used to be, pandemics of virus and addiction both to substances and one's occupation. In a sense, minus one or two forgivable excesses which are natural to the author and the genre, it feels almost like Bradbury really did borrow Wells's time machine and took copious notes on what he saw.
I'm not aware of any other modern authors (yet) who have managed to capture the present moment so eloquently and with such keen criticism and skill. Like John of Patmos, he gave us a revelation about the future from his perspective. The ills of technology, the lust for power and money, the dangers of blind wealth, and the impulse to explore are all captured with almost perfect clarity. He puts his finger on the pulse of the American dream, eloquently describing the intrinsic fears that motivate, the tyrannical ideas that pervade, and the swollen self-pride that ultimately destroys us.
He gave a hint at the secret of his magnificent futurism in the following quote, in which he both winks and then sharpens his quill: “Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present.” On that scathing note, I offer you one of America's best writers and encourage you to make a foray into his weird, sometimes terrifying, but always terrifyingly accurate future.
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