Technology In Fahrenheit 451, By Ray Bradbury

In the Science fiction book Fahrenheit 451, written by Ray Bradbury, the author illustrates for his reader a futuristic Chicago set in 2053 where the technology is far beyond the technology had in 1953, the year the book was published. Past and even modern day Sci-Fi writers have written books about the future by making an inference about what kind of technology that humans might have in 20 years based on what machinery the author has at the time, and Ray Bradbury has even elaborated further than just technology by predicting a society’s future. The book begins with a fireman named Guy Montag, a kind of mysterious soul with a lot of mixed feelings about what is going on in his life. Firemen in this novel burn books because of their “insignificance”

Some kinds of technology that is in the book is TV walls. In the Montag household, Guy’s wife, Mildred has 3 TV walls and is looking forward to getting another. She can interact with the TV shows just like our modern day Wii or Xbox Kinect. Bradbury also created things in his book that have come true today, like the mechanic dog, which is just like the robot cheetah that scientist have created. Another piece of technology in the book was made by Faber. Faber hopes his device will help himself and Montag in their job to fix society by saying, “If you put it in your ear, Montag, I can sit comfortably at home, warming my frightened bones, and hear and analyze the firemen’s world, find its weaknesses, without danger’ (Bradbury 87). Faber and Montag had worked out a plan to use the earpiece so that Faber can listen in to Montag’s conversations with Captain Beatty and help him decide what to say. Bradbury sort of predicted the future because in modern day, the earpiece in the book seems just like our modern day Bluetooth. Not only has Bradbury predicted a technological future, but a societal one as

People no longer catch up with the things they used to care about. The war that is going on in their world is killing people, and all the citizens don’t even know if their loved ones are still alive, nor do they care. Faber talks with Montag about societal issues and explains to him what has happened: “I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them…. And then the Government, seeing how advantageous it was to have people reading only about passionate lips and the fist in the stomach circled the situation with your fire eaters” (Bradbury 85). People in Bradbury’s “fictional” world no longer read the updated news anymore, and it’s like they’ve stopped caring altogether about what goes on outside of their own lives. In a way, that is sort of coming true in our world today. Today people don’t keep up with the latest politics or news because they believe that whatever they read doesn’t affect