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No books were harmed in the making of this motion picture. There will be no such disclaimer at the end of my new film, because we burned a lot of books. We designed powerful, kerosene-spitting flamethrowers and torched books - en masse. This was not easy for me to do. I was taught at a very young age to read and respect books. Even setting a teacup on a book was considered a sin. In my parents' household, Hafez's book of Persian poetry, "The Divan," was revered like a religious text.

But now I was making a film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's seminal novel, "Fahrenheit 451," which presents a future America where books are outlawed and firemen burn them. The protagonist, a fireman named Guy Montag, begins to doubt his actions and turns against his mentor, Captain Beatty. When I set out to adapt the novel early in 2016, I was faced with a big question: Do people still care about physical books?

I asked an 82-year-old friend for advice. "Go ahead and burn books," he said. "They mean nothing to me. I can read anything on my tablet, from the 'Epic of Gilgamesh' to Jo Nesbo, and I can read them in bed, on a plane or next to the ocean, because it's all in the cloud, safe from your firemen's torches."

If he felt this way, what would teenagers think? Bradbury's novel is a classic taught in high schools across America. But the more I thought about it, the more relevant the novel seemed. For Bradbury, books were repositories of knowledge and ideas. He feared a future in which those things would be endangered, and now that future was here: The internet and new social-media platforms - and their potential threat to serious thought - would be at the heart of my adaptation.

I had never adapted a book, let alone one so important. Altering a work so brilliant and beloved always upsets some fans. I knew Bradbury had supported François Truffaut's 1966 film adaptation. More important, Bradbury himself had reimagined "Fahrenheit 451," first as a stage play and then as a musical, changing many elements, including letting Montag's neighbor Clarisse McClellan live. (In the novel, she dies early on.) With Bradbury as my guide, and a vow to stay true to his ideas, I began working on the script.

"Fahrenheit 451" was written in the early 1950s, not long after Nazis burned books and, eventually, human beings. America was living under a cloud of fear created by the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthyism, which brought political repression, blacklists and censorship of literature and art. These anxieties permeate the novel.

But Bradbury's key inspiration was the invasion of seven-inch black-and-white televisions into people's homes. Bradbury was no Luddite. He wrote screenplays, including one for an adaptation of "Moby-Dick." He also wrote 65 episodes of a television series, "The Ray Bradbury Theater." But in "Fahrenheit 451" Bradbury was warning us about the threat of mass media to reading, about the bombardment of digital sensations that could substitute for critical thinking.

In the novel, he imagined a world where people are entertained day and night by staring at giant wall screens in their homes. They interact with their "friends" through these screens, listening to them via "Seashells" - Bradbury's version of Apple's wireless AirPods - inserted in their ears. In this world, people would be crammed "full of noncombustible data" - words to popular songs, the names of state capitals, the amount of "corn Iowa grew last year." They will "feel they're thinking," Bradbury wrote, "and they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change."

Bradbury was worried about the advent of Reader's Digest. Today we have Wikipedia and tweets. He worried that people would read only headlines. Today it seems that half the words online have been replaced with emojis. The more we erode language, the more we erode complex thought and the easier we are to control.

Bradbury feared memory loss. Today we have designated Google and our social-media accounts as the guardians of our memories, emotions, dreams and facts. As tech companies consolidate power, imagine how easy it could be to rewrite Benjamin Franklin's Wiki entry to match what the firemen in Bradbury's novel learn about the history of the fire department: "Established, 1790, to burn English-influenced books in the Colonies. First Fireman: Benjamin Franklin." In his way, Bradbury predicted the rise of "alternative facts" and an era of "post-truth."

As the virtual world becomes more dominant, owning books becomes an act of rebellion. When a printed book is in your possession, no one can track, alter or hack it. The characters in my film have never seen a book. When they first encounter a library, the books are like water in a vast digital desert. Seeing, touching and smelling a book is as alien to the firemen as milking a cow by hand would be for most of us. The firemen are transfixed by the books - but they still have to burn them.

Burning books in the film posed a legal challenge. The cover art of most books is protected by copyright, and in most cases we were unable to obtain permission to display it - let alone burn it on camera. So the art directors for my film designed countless original book covers that we could burn.

The question was: Which books? There were always more I wanted to burn than we had time to film. I knew I wanted to include some of my favorites, like "Crime and Punishment," "Song of Solomon" and the works of Franz Kafka. But we had to burn more than just fiction. Herodotus' "Histories" - history itself - was incinerated. Pages of Emily Dickinson, Tagore and Ferdowsi's poetry crumbled into black ash. Hegel, Plato and Grace Lee Boggs's philosophy were set on fire. The firemen discriminate against no one: Texts in Chinese, Hindi, Persian and Spanish all burned. A Mozart score, an Edvard Munch painting, magazines, newspapers, photographs of Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass and the 1969 moon landing went up in smoke.

Even the most fanatic firemen would have a hard time burning all the copies of a best seller like "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." After J. K. Rowling spoke out against Donald Trump on Twitter, people tweeted that they were planning to burn their Harry Potter books. So we followed suit. Famously banned books had to go: "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," "Lolita," "Leaves of Grass" and "The Communist Manifesto." While we were shooting the film, "To Kill a Mockingbird," a frequent target of censorship, was once again banned in some schools, so into the flames it went. For some authors, having a book burned in the film was a badge of honor. Werner Herzog and Hamid Dabashi generously donated their work to be burned alongside the best and the worst of literature. If we save "Wise Blood" then we must preserve "Mein Kampf" as well.

Watching the books burn was an otherworldly experience. The hiss of incinerating pages sounded like the final gasps of hundreds of dying souls. The more we burned, the more hypnotic it became - a mesmerizing spectacle of pages curling and embers dancing into the void.

Bradbury believed that we wanted the world to become this way. That we asked for the firemen to burn books. That we wanted entertainment to replace reading and thinking. That we voted for political and economic systems to keep us happy rather than thoughtfully informed. He would say that we chose to give up our privacy and freedom to tech companies. That we decided to entrust our cultural heritage and knowledge to digital archives. The greatest army of firemen will be irrelevant in the digital world. They will be as powerless as spitting babies next to whoever controls a consolidated internet. How could they stop one person, hiding in his parents' basement with a laptop, from hacking into thousands of years of humanity's collective history, literature and culture, and then rewriting all of it ... or just hitting delete?

And who would notice?

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Why 'Fahrenheit 451' Is the Book for Our Social Media Age

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No books were harmed in the making of this motion picture. There will be no such disclaimer at the end of my new film, because we burned a lot of books. We designed powerful, kerosene-spitting flamethrowers and torched books - en masse. This was not easy for me to do.

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Michael B. Jordan has really been bringing the heat lately, first by destroying teenagers' retainers as Killmonger in Black Panther, and now, more literally, as a fireman in HBO's Fahrenheit 451.

The movie adaptation of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel doesn't come out until May 19, but the full-length trailer HBO dropped on Thursday gives us more of a taste of what's to come. In it, Michael B. Jordan's character, Guy Montag, grapples with his role in burning "almost every physical book in the country" alongside his fire captain, Beatty (Michael Shannon). Even while taking what appear to be mind-controlling eye drops, Montag starts to question "why we burn."

The new trailer takes us into a not-so-far-off future, based on the dystopia Bradbury imagined, where children don't know what books are, holographic advertisements scream at us at every turn, and people are controlled by pharmaceuticals. Even still, Montag can't help but question his reality and appears to find himself among a cohort of rebels trying to restore knowledge to the world.

The film, directed by Ramin Bahrani, debuts on HBO next month. Until then, enjoy clips of Michael B. Jordan brooding about the "insanity" of books above.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily. Follow Lauren Messman on Twitter.

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Michael B. Jordan Questions His Reality in the New 'Fahrenheit 451' Trailer

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Michael B. Jordan has really been bringing the heat lately, first by destroying teenagers' retainers as Killmonger in Black Panther, and now, more literally, as a fireman in HBO's Fahrenheit 451 . The movie adaptation of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel doesn't come out until May 19, but the full-length trailer HBO dropped on Thursday gives us more of a taste of what's to come.

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Google Doc

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This unit was created by the Louisiana Department of Education in partnership with LearnZillion. It includes approximately 42 days of instructional materials including classroom-ready materials, assessments, graphic organizers, and texts.

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Study Guide with answers to Multiple Choice and Short Answer

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Study Guide with answers to Multiple Choice and Short Answer

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Suggested Responses to Discussion Questions for Fahrenheit 451

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Audio (Ironic!)

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Set in a future where books are outlawed and firemen burn any they find, fireman Guy Montag questions his role in society and joins an organization committed to starting a revolution.

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CommonLit | Book Pairings - Fahrenheit 451

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For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your web browser. Set in a future where books are outlawed and firemen burn any they find, fireman Guy Montag questions his role in society and joins an organization committed to starting a revolution.

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2018 Fahrenheit451 An Introductory Powerpoint 2015 (3).pptx

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Discussion Questions
1. Why would society make "being a pedestrian" a crime? (Clarisse tells Montag that her uncle was once arrested for this.)

2. One suicide and one near-suicide occur in this book. One woman, who shuns books but loves TV and driving fast in her car, anesthetizes herself,; "We get these cases nine or ten a night," says the medical technician. Another woman, who cherishes her books, sets herself on fire with them; "These fanatics always try suicide," says the fire captain. Why would two people who seem to be so different from each other try to take their own lives? Why does suicide happen so frequently in Montag's society?"

3. Captain Beatty quotes history, scripture, poetry, philosophy. He is obviously a well-read man. Why hasn't he been punished? And why does he view the books he's read with such contempt?

4. Beatty tells Montag that firemen are "custodians of peace of mind" and that they stand against "those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought." How well are the firemen accomplishing these objectives? Are conflicting ideas the only source of unhappiness in their society? What other sources might there be? Can conflicting ideas exist even without books that have been destroyed and outlawed?

5. Why do you think the firemen's rulebook credited Benjamin Franklin-writer, publisher, political leader, inventor, ambassador-as being the first fireman?

6. Why does Beatty program the Hound to track Montag even before Montag stole the book? Do you believe Beatty had seen him steal books before? Or is it that Beatty had detected a change in Montag's attitude or behavior? Cite incidents in the book that support your answer.

7. Montag turns to books to rescue him; instead they help demolish his life- -he loses his wife, job and home; he kills a man and is forced to be a nomad. Does he gain any benefits from books? If so, what are they?

8. Do you believe, as Montag did, that Beatty wanted to die? If so, why do you think so?

9. Since the government is so opposed to readers, thinkers, walkers, and slow drivers, why does it allow the procession of men along the railroad tracks to exist?

10. Once Montag becomes a violent revolutionary, why does the government purposely capture an innocent man in his place instead of tracking down the real Montag? Might the government believe that Montag is no longer a threat?

11. Granger, spokesperson for the group on the railroad tracks, tells Montag, "Right now we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end...When the war's over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world." Based on what you've read of the world these men live in, do you believe that the books they carry inside themselves will make a difference? Might this difference be positive or negative? Point out episodes in Fahrenheit to support your response.

12. What does Granger mean when he says, "We're going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long time to look at them?" Why would "mirrors" be important in this new society? (Note: In Part 1, Clarisse is said to be "like a mirror.")

13. Although Ray Bradbury's work is often referred to as science fiction, Fahrenheit has plenty to say about the world as it is, and not as it could be. As you review the book, list examples of the themes mentioned below, as well as others you notice. Discuss how you feel about the stands the author or characters take in Fahrenheit.
( Questions issued by publisher.)

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Discussion Questions 1. Why would society make "being a pedestrian" a crime? (Clarisse tells Montag that her uncle was once arrested for this.) 2. One suicide and one near-suicide occur in this book. One woman, who shuns books but loves TV and driving fast in her car, anesthetizes herself,; "We get these cases nine or ten a night," says the medical technician.

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Since first being published in 1967, and despite being considered one of the great modern novels, Kurt Vonnegut's time-hopping, semi-autobiographical, anti-war classic, Slaughterhouse-Five, has been, and continues to be, banned from classrooms and libraries the world over due to what is often described by those who censor it as its "obscene" content. This view wasn't held by Bruce Severy, a then-26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota, who in 1973 decided to use the novel as a teaching aid in his classroom, much to the delight of his students. Unfortunately for them, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, had other ideas: the next month, on November 10th, he demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace.

Days later, an angry and disappointed Kurt Vonnegut wrote to Charles McCarthy and made his feelings known. His letter failed to generate a reply.

( Source: The Letters of Note book, reproduced with permission of The Estate of Kurt Vonnegut.)

November 16, 1973

Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don't damage children much. They didn't damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, "Yes, yes-but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community." This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can't stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books-books you hadn't even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

Kurt Vonnegut

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Since first being published in 1967, and despite being considered one of the great modern novels, Kurt Vonnegut's time-hopping, semi-autobiographical, anti-war classic, Slaughterhouse-Five , has been, and continues to be, banned from classrooms and libraries the world over due to what is often described by those who censor it as its "obscene" content.

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The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold | Poetry Foundation

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Protecting each other, right in the center
a few pages glow a long time.
The cover goes first, then outer leaves
curling away, then spine and a scattering.
Truth, brittle and faint, burns easily,
its fire as hot as the fire lies make---
flame doesn't care. You can usually find
a few charred words in the ashes.

And some books ought to burn, trying
for character
but just faking it. More disturbing
than book ashes are whole libraries that
no one
got around to writing----desolate
towns, miles of unthought in cities,
and the terrorized countryside where
wild dogs
own anything that moves. If a book
isn't written, no one needs to burn it----
ignorance can dance in the absence of fire.

So I've burned books. And there are many
I haven't even written, and nobody has.

(1987)

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Protecting each other, right in the centera few pages glow a long time.The cover goes first, then outer leavescurling away, then spine and a scattering.Truth, brittle and faint, burns easily,its fire as hot as the fire lies make---flame doesn't care. You can usually finda few charred words in the ashes.

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As I've been writing in almost every intro over the last few days, I've been attending a ton of press junkets this past week and I'm getting ready to post a ton of interviews with just about every major celebrity in Hollywood. Over the next week or so you can expect all of them to be online, but while it's going to take sometime to transcribe everything, I wanted to get some of the juicy stuff online today.

At yesterday's "Bucket List" junket, I was able to participate in a mini press conference with Craig Zadan and Neil Meron - two of the producers. Recently,the two of them have been on a role, as they just produced "Hairspray" and they're getting ready to produce Frank Darabont's next film "Fahrenheit 451."

Over the last ten years this project has started and stopped numerous times. For a long time Mel Gibson was attached to star in the project, and then he was also going to direct it. But as Craig will explain below, once Mel decided to just direct and not star in it, the project lost its way.

But now, after years and years, Frank Darabont is going to be the one to bring the classic Ray Bradbury story to life once again. As a huge fan of Frank's and the original story, I cannot wait to find out who will be starring in the film.

And even though the writers strike is still going on, according to Craig Zadan, all they need is to get actors and they could be shooting tomorrow. He says the script is ready to go. But while he's confident about the script, his partner Neil seems to disagree as he says the script is, " still a work in progress."

What that means for a start date.... I have no idea. The good news is that Frank is making this his next project and Craig told me the budget is going to be around 70 or so million. That's a solid number and something that if shot abroad - like Craig says they'll do - can be made to look a lot more than it actually is.

Anyway, here's what Craig and Neil said. If you'd like to hear the audio you can click here for the MP3. Just know it's the entire press conference and not the selected quotes that I posted below.

Question: I hear you guys are going to be doing Fahrenheit 451 and I'm wondering what the inspiration to move into that genre was?

Q: Is it a script that's done and can be going?

Q: Do you have a start date for Fahrenheit?

Q: I wanted to know, are you guys going after Tom Hanks? Cause a lot of rumors are that Tom Hanks is going to be...

Q: So my question for you is...the script is ready to go though.

Q: So if you had the cast...

Q: So is there any sort of goal to try and get it done by June before the "actors strike"?

Q: But the studio... this is definitely a priority project.

Q: So glad you're doing it.

Q: So how close to the original is it going to be?

Q: So it won't be a modern...it's definitely sticking with the books.

Q: Do you guys have a budget in mind? Is this a mid-size budget? Is it a big, big budget?

Craig Zadan: Craig: It's going to be more in the range of say 70 or something like that. It won't be over a 100... it'll be more like 65 or 70ish, in that area. It won't be enormously expensive but we'll have to shoot it in a place like Prague or something like that to try and get a good deal on....

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The Producers of Frank Darabont's FAHRENHEIT 451 Answer Some Questions

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As I've been writing in almost every intro over the last few days, I've been attending a ton of press junkets this past week and I'm getting ready to post a ton of interviews with just about every major celebrity ...

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"The important thing," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in contemplating the cultural role of speculative fiction and the task of its writer, "is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader's mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live." In doing so, she argued, imaginative storytelling can intercept the inertia of oppressive institutions, perilous social mores, and other stagnations of progress that contract our scope of the possible.

Hardly any work of imaginative storytelling has stood as more enduring and full-bodied a testament to this ideal than Ray Bradbury's 1953 masterwork Fahrenheit 451 - a love letter to books and to the people who care about them and, perhaps above all, to the very capacity for caring. This capacity was the animating force of Bradbury's uncommon genius, and it finds a contemporary counterpart and kindred spirit in Neil Gaiman - a writer of firm conviction and porous curiosity, an idealist amid our morass of cynicism, writing to remind us over and over again who we are and who we can be if we commit to wresting goodness out of our imperfect humanity.

The abiding splendor and significance of the ideas and ideals at the heart of Bradbury's classic is what Gaiman explores in a beautiful piece titled "Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, and What Science Fiction Is and Does," originally written as an introduction to a sixtieth-anniversary edition of the book and now included in his altogether magnificent The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (public library) - a collection of Gaiman's essays, speeches, reviews, and various meditations on life, literature, and the life and love of literature.

Gaiman begins at the beginning - the elemental impulse to imagine, to record these imaginings, and to share them with others:

Sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist. We do it for a hundred reasons. (Because it's good to look forward, not back. Because we need to illuminate a path we hope or we fear humanity will take. Because the world of the future seems more enticing or more interesting than the world of today. Because we need to warn you. To encourage. To examine. To imagine.) The reasons for writing about the day after tomorrow, and all the tomorrows that follow it, are as many and as varied as the people writing.

With an eye to the Bradbury classic's cultural role as "a book of warning" and "a reminder that what we have is valuable, and that sometimes we take what we value for granted," Gaiman offers a taxonomy of the three types of speculative questions that frame our scope of alternative possibilities:

There are three phrases that make possible the world of writing about the world of not-yet (you can call it science fiction or speculative fiction; you can call it anything you wish) and they are simple phrases:

What if ... ?
If only ...
If this goes on ...

"What if ... ?" gives us change, a departure from our lives. (What if aliens landed tomorrow and gave us everything we wanted, but at a price?)

"If only ..." lets us explore the glories and dangers of tomorrow. (If only dogs could talk. If only I was invisible.)

"If this goes on..." is the most predictive of the three, although it doesn't try to predict an actual future with all its messy confusion. Instead, "If this goes on..." fiction takes an element of life today, something clear and obvious and normally something troubling, and asks what would happen if that thing, that one thing, became bigger, became all-pervasive, changed the way we thought and behaved. (If this goes on, all communication everywhere will be through text messages or computers, and direct speech between two people, without a machine, will be outlawed.)

It's a cautionary question, and it lets us explore cautionary worlds.

Therein, Gaiman argues, lies the greatest gift of the book - in raising cautionary questions about the present and its alternatives, rather than in predicting the future. He considers this broader role of all speculative fiction:

People think, wrongly, that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn't - or if it is, it tends to do a rotten job of it. Futures are huge things that come with many elements and a billion variables, and the human race has a habit of listening to predictions for what the future will bring and then doing something quite different.

What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future, but the present. Taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place.

This offering of alternative perspectives is as nourishing to culture as the difficult but necessary practice of alternative interpretations is to our inner lives and our psychological stability - lest we forget, our perilous pathology of self-criticism arises from an incapacity for such multiplicity of interpretation and it enslaves us in the same way that our cultural blinders do. Speculative fiction, Gaiman argues, grants us a liberation of vision - but only so long as we honor its most essential characteristic: the multiplicity of meanings to any one story. Half a century after Susan Sontag's admonition against the tyranny of interpretation, he cautions:

Listen.

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.

If they tell you that that is all the story is about, they are very definitely wrong.

Any story is about a host of things. It is about the author; it is about the world the author sees and deals with and lives in; it is about the words chosen and the way those words are deployed; it is about the story itself and what happens in the story; it is about the people in the story; it is polemic; it is opinion.

An author's opinions of what a story is about are always valid and are always true: the author was there, after all, when the book was written. She came up with each word and knows why she used that word instead of another. But an author is a creature of her time, and even she cannot see everything that her book is about.

Bradbury was only thirty-two when he began writing the short story that became Fahrenheit 451 and he wrote it on a rental typewriter in a university basement library. It was of its time - a time when the chills of the Cold War had just been stoked and the golden era of consumerism was gathering momentum and television was coming of age as a mass medium - but it is also, in its central cautionary question, timeless.

Gaiman considers that question:

"If this goes on ..." thought Ray Bradbury, "nobody will read books anymore," and the book began.

[...]

"What if ... firemen burned down houses instead of saving them?" Bradbury thought, and now he had his way in to the story. He had a fireman named Guy Montag, who saved a book from the flames instead of burning it.

"If only ... books could be saved," he thought. If you destroy all the physical books, how can you still save them?

[...]

He called the Los Angeles fire department and asked them at what temperature paper burned. Fahrenheit 451, somebody told him. He had his title. It didn't matter if it was true or not.

The book was published and acclaimed. People loved the book, and they argued about it. It was a novel about censorship, they said, about mind control, about humanity. About government control of our lives. About books.

But the aboutness of the book, like the aboutness of any book, Gaiman reminds us, is porous and responsive and in constant dynamic interaction with the context of its time, its place, and the locus of circumstances in the reader's life at the particular moment of reading it.

In a testament to Susan Sontag's case for rereading as rebirth, Gaiman recounts the evolution of the Bradbury classic along the axis of his own life:

I read Fahrenheit 451 as a boy: I did not understand Guy Montag, did not understand why he did what he did, but I understood the love of books that drove him. Books were the most important things in my life. The huge wall-screen televisions were as futuristic and implausible as the idea that people on the television would talk to me, that I could take part, if I had a script. It was never a favorite book: it was too dark, too bleak for that. But when I read a story called "Usher II" in The Silver Locusts (the UK title for The Martian Chronicles), I recognized the world of outlawed authors and imagination with a fierce sort of familiar joy.

When I reread it as a teenager, Fahrenheit 451 had become a book about independence, about thinking for yourself. It was about treasuring books and the dissent inside the covers of books. It was about how we as humans begin by burning books and end by burning people.

Rereading it as an adult I find myself marveling at the book once more. It is all of those things, yes, but it is also a period piece... A young reader, finding this book today, or the day after tomorrow, is going to have to imagine first a past, and then a future that belongs to that past.

But still, the heart of the book remains untouched, and the questions Bradbury raises remain as valid and important.

The most central of these question is also the most abiding: Why do we need books at all? It's a question to which some of humanity's most luminous minds have provided spirited answers over the millennia. For Galileo, books were a way of having superhuman powers; for Kafka, "the axe for the frozen sea within us"; for Carl Sagan, "proof that humans are capable of working magic"; for James Baldwin, a way to change our destiny; for Rebecca Solnit, the planting of seeds from which enormous possibility can blossom; for Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, our ultimate frontier of freedom. "Reading," E.B. White wrote as he peered into the future of reading shortly before Bradbury wrote his masterpiece, "is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy." Bradbury himself considered reading the key to democracy.

Gaiman contributes his own answer, straddling the political and the poetic:

Why do we need the things in books? The poems, the essays, the stories? Authors disagree. Authors are human and fallible and foolish. Stories are lies after all, tales of people who never existed and the things that never actually happened to them. Why should we read them? Why should we care?

The teller and the tale are very different. We must not forget that.

Ideas, written ideas, are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our ideas from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

In another short piece from the book, titled "Credo," Gaiman builds on this foundational truth:

I believe that it is difficult to kill an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast.

I believe that you can set your own ideas against ideas you dislike. That you should be free to argue, explain, clarify, debate, offend, insult, rage, mock, sing, dramatize, and deny.

I do not believe that burning, murdering, exploding people, smashing their heads with rocks (to let the bad ideas out), drowning them or even defeating them will work to contain ideas you do not like. Ideas spring up where you do not expect them, like weeds, and are as difficult to control.

I believe that repressing ideas spreads ideas.

The View from the Cheap Seats is a tremendous read in its totality - an electrifying packet of that "fierce sort of familiar joy" full of Gaiman's beautifully articulated beliefs about such centralities of the human experience as art, gender, fear, and community, alongside his reflections on and homages to friends, heroes, and kindred spirits like Terry Pratchett, Charles Vess, Douglas Adams, and Tori Amos.

Even the book's dedication to Gaiman's newborn son radiates his genial genius:

For Ash, who is new, for when he is grown.

These were some of the things your father loved and said and cared about and believed, a long time ago.

Complement this particular portion with Bradbury on the importance of love in creative work and the secret of a fulfilling vocation, then revisit Gaiman on how stories last, the psychological pillars of the creative life, why fairy tales captivate us, his eight rules of writing, and his advice to aspiring writers.

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the view from the cheap seats: selected nonfiction

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The Power of Cautionary Questions: Neil Gaiman on Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451,' Why We Read, and How Speculative Storytelling Enlarges Our Humanity

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"The important thing," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in contemplating the cultural role of speculative fiction and the task of its writer, "is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader's mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live."

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BERKELEY, Calif. - Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too.

Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google's Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online - simply with music playing over the radio.

A group of students from University of California, Berkeley, and Georgetown University showed in 2016 that they could hide commands in white noise played over loudspeakers and through YouTube videos to get smart devices to turn on airplane mode or open a website.

This month, some of those Berkeley researchers published a research paper that went further, saying they could embed commands directly into recordings of music or spoken text. So while a human listener hears someone talking or an orchestra playing, Amazon's Echo speaker might hear an instruction to add something to your shopping list.

"We wanted to see if we could make it even more stealthy," said Nicholas Carlini, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in computer security at U.C. Berkeley and one of the paper's authors.

[ Read more on what Alexa can hear when brought into your home]

Mr. Carlini added that while there was no evidence that these techniques have left the lab, it may only be a matter of time before someone starts exploiting them. "My assumption is that the malicious people already employ people to do what I do," he said.

These deceptions illustrate how artificial intelligence - even as it is making great strides - can still be tricked and manipulated. Computers can be fooled into identifying an airplane as a cat just by changing a few pixels of a digital image, while researchers can make a self-driving car swerve or speed up simply by pasting small stickers on road signs and confusing the vehicle's computer vision system.

With audio attacks, the researchers are exploiting the gap between human and machine speech recognition. Speech recognition systems typically translate each sound to a letter, eventually compiling those into words and phrases. By making slight changes to audio files, researchers were able to cancel out the sound that the speech recognition system was supposed to hear and replace it with a sound that would be transcribed differently by machines while being nearly undetectable to the human ear.

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The Amazon Echo in a kitchen. Credit Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times

The proliferation of voice-activated gadgets amplifies the implications of such tricks. Smartphones and smart speakers that use digital assistants like Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri are set to outnumber people by 2021, according to the research firm Ovum. And more than half of all American households will have at least one smart speaker by then, according to Juniper Research.

Amazon said that it doesn't disclose specific security measures, but it has taken steps to ensure its Echo smart speaker is secure. Google said security is an ongoing focus and that its Assistant has features to mitigate undetectable audio commands. Both companies' assistants employ voice recognition technology to prevent devices from acting on certain commands unless they recognize the user's voice.

Apple said its smart speaker, HomePod, is designed to prevent commands from doing things like unlocking doors, and it noted that iPhones and iPads must be unlocked before Siri will act on commands that access sensitive data or open apps and websites, among other measures.

Yet many people leave their smartphones unlocked, and, at least for now, voice recognition systems are notoriously easy to fool.

There is already a history of smart devices being exploited for commercial gains through spoken commands.

Last year, Burger King caused a stir with an online ad that purposely asked 'O.K., Google, what is the Whopper burger?" Android devices with voice-enabled search would respond by reading from the Whopper's Wikipedia page. The ad was canceled after viewers started editing the Wikipedia page to comic effect.
[Read more on how we may soon be living in Alexa's world]
A few months later, the animated series South Park followed up with an entire episode built around voice commands that caused viewers' voice-recognition assistants to parrot adolescent obscenities.

There is no American law against broadcasting subliminal messages to humans, let alone machines. The Federal Communications Commission discourages the practice as "counter to the public interest," and the Television Code of the National Association of Broadcasters bans "transmitting messages below the threshold of normal awareness." Neither say anything about subliminal stimuli for smart devices.

Courts have ruled that subliminal messages may constitute an invasion of privacy, but the law has not extended the concept of privacy to machines.

Now the technology is racing even further ahead of the law. Last year, researchers at Princeton University and China's Zhejiang University demonstrated that voice-recognition systems could be activated by using frequencies inaudible to the human ear. The attack first muted the phone so the owner wouldn't hear the system's responses, either.

The technique, which the Chinese researchers called DolphinAttack, can instruct smart devices to visit malicious websites, initiate phone calls, take a picture or send text messages. While DolphinAttack has its limitations - the transmitter must be close to the receiving device - experts warned that more powerful ultrasonic systems were possible.

That warning was borne out in April, when researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated ultrasound attacks from 25 feet away. While the commands couldn't penetrate walls, they could control smart devices through open windows from outside a building.

This year, another group of Chinese and American researchers from China's Academy of Sciences and other institutions, demonstrated they could control voice-activated devices with commands embedded in songs that can be broadcast over the radio or played on services like YouTube.

More recently, Mr. Carlini and his colleagues at Berkeley have incorporated commands into audio recognized by Mozilla's DeepSpeech voice-to-text translation software, an open-source platform. They were able to hide the command, "O.K. Google, browse to evil.com " in a recording of the spoken phrase, "Without the data set, the article is useless." Humans cannot discern the command.

The Berkeley group also embedded the command in music files, including a four-second clip from Verdi's "Requiem."

How device makers respond will differ, especially as they balance security with ease of use.

"Companies have to ensure user-friendliness of their devices, because that's their major selling point," said Tavish Vaidya, a researcher at Georgetown. He wrote one of the first papers on audio attacks, which he titled "Cocaine Noodles" because devices interpreted the phrase "cocaine noodles" as "O.K., Google."

Mr. Carlini said he was confident that in time he and his colleagues could mount successful adversarial attacks against any smart device system on the market.

"We want to demonstrate that it's possible," he said, "and then hope that other people will say, 'O.K. this is possible, now let's try and fix it.' "

Follow Craig S. Smith on Twitter: @craigss

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Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can't.

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BERKELEY, Calif. - Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too.

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Pre-IB Summer Assignments

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Introduction by Neil Gaiman