Fahrenheit 451: 60th Anniversary - Ray Bradbury, Introduction by Neil Gaiman
What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future but the present - taking an aspect of it thtat troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into tsomething that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It’s cautionary.
It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boolm! it’s all over.
We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are hapy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute.
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
If not, we’ll just have to wait. We’ll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can’t make people listen. They have to comre round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can’t last.
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people at that tree orthat flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawn and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The law-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
Bradbury virtually lived in the public libraries of his time, and came to see the shelves as populations of living authors: to burn the book is to burn the author, and to burn the author is to deny our own humanity.