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Zapping Present-Day Folly, Sci-Fi Does Its Moral Duty Zapping Present-Day Foibles Time

Posted on: Tuesday, 24 August 2004, 06:00 CDT

BOOKMAN'S holiday: the newly minted Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.

"Come walk through otherworldly landscapes, experience unexpected contact with alien life forms and encounter futuristic technologies."

Talk about your otherworldly landscapes. It's located at the base of the Space Needle in downtown Seattle . Floating nearby, above the southeast skyline like some overwhelming baked Alaska in the haze, is snow-crusted Mount Rainier.

The Science Fiction Museum is a monument to the imagination. Robbie the Robot resides here.

It's a trip in time from claptrap to the cosmos, with unforgettable imagery linking the space sirens of Norman Saunders to the red dust of the Mars Global Surveyor orbiting camera.

At the core of the place is a prominently displayed copy of "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury (Ballantine Books, 208 pp., $6.99), now out in a golden anniversary edition, which testifies to its enduring power as popular American literature.

(The volume is not to be confused with Michael Moore's current satirical film, which hijacked Bradbury's title.)

Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which books burn. Bradbury's premonitory story of a censorious government that starts conflagrations instead of putting them out appeared in its final form in 1953. A shorter version came out in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine three years before that under the title "The Fire Man." The inspiration for it was undoubtedly the Nazi assault on freedom of the press and speech in Germany, which expressed itself in spectacular book bonfires.

Books, Adolf Hitler felt, confused people. They supplied readers with choices. Worse than that: They presented the citizenry with an implicit obligation to make a few on their own.

Science fiction purports to see the future, but it is always firmly rooted in the present. Bradbury's 1950s book, looking beyond the millennium, was really confronting McCarthyism. American politicians closed ranks in those days against what they regarded as a communist threat by pulling titles from the shelves of Red Cross lending libraries and disenfranchising argumentative authors and artists.

In the course of his story of a rebellious firefighter named Montag (after the paper manufacturer) and a dissenting English prof named Faber (after the pencil maker), Bradbury predicted political correctness, the violent soporific of wall-to-wall TV, Walkman, "reality" broadcasting and the wholesale dumbing down of public education in the United States.

Emblematic of that, as he noted in an afterword, Bradbury "discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book- burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Ray, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place."

Now we have substituted our fear of communists with our fear of terrorists, and the disingenuously named Patriot Act has taken dead aim at libraries, among other things. But science fiction remains a moral force. Check out for evidence "The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection" edited by Gardner Dozois (St. Martin's Griffin, 665 pp., $19.95).

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