Dying To Read

It’s 1990, knee deep into the science fiction-y future. And books, deemed hedonistic, are outlawed. This is why TV is better than books, which ironically, are TVs you can’t plug in.

The firemen of the future don’t put out fires, they start ’em, raiding apartments to find cleverly hidden novels and anything else resembling the written word, and burning them into unreadable ash. Those charred remains are then doubled burned in case someone figures out how to glue the ashes back together and start reading, which is also against the law.

Unfortunately, some people would rather go up in flames with their books than have a life without ’em. I guess making a reference to cook books (Kindle Fire™ – heh) would be really harsh here, so I won’t do it in the name of all that is decent. (Wanting to make a joke about it is burning me up.)

Fahrenheit 451 (1966, and based on a Ray Bradbury unburnt book in 1953) is in reference to the temperature at which paper ignites. This just sucks – what the gosh darn heck am I supposed to do with all these crayons? The future blows.