I wanted to like this better, I really did. But honestly it felt less like a story than a series of authorial lectures funneled through various character mouthpieces. The one high point of the piece was when Beatty was finally made to shut the hell up. Listening to him was like being trapped in a room with a drunk person who's only got one topic of conversation - rambling, incoherent, and not nearly as profound as he thinks he is.

I've been trying to think why this left me so cold - because there's some good ideas in here, there really are, and that's what's saving it from a single star - and I think I finally have it. It's the over-the-top melodrama of it all. The blurb above calls it terrifying. It isn't. And when I compare Fahrenheit 451 to Orwell's 1984, I can see why my tastes have diverged. Orwell's future is a chilling, mostly stripped back account focused on limiting thought by limiting language. Bradbury's future is hysterical over-reaction all the way. It's not rewriting a past article and slipping the original version quietly down the memory hole, it's flamethrowers at night to heighten the dramatic effect of all the book-burning. With the best will in the world I cannot take it remotely seriously.