Fahrenheit 451 is a science fiction book that still reflects to our current world. Bradbury does a nice job predicting what the world would be like in the future; the future for his time period and for ours as well. The society he describes is, in many ways, like the one we are living in right now. We are always demanding more advanced machinery, and from the past, we have grown into a much more technological society. Lately, more and more people not only want more technology, they want them to be quicker.
Things such as quicker computers, quicker connections to the internet, better cell phone connections, pagers, cars with more power, voice mail, palm pilots, etc. are in greater demand. People don’t want to waste time anymore. We want things done quicker without as much effort. We want things to take less time to do them so we can have more time for other things. Their society is exactly like ours. Besides having advanced technological machines, they also have much larger speed limits, so people could get where they want a lot faster.
Clarisse and Montag make it obvious to the reader that they live in a fast-paced world when they first meet each other. Before Clarisse runs into her house, they notice how fast drivers go that they “‘don’t know what grass is, or flowers because they never see them slowly,’ she said. ‘If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he’d say, that’s grass! A pink blur! That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days'”(9).
Their speed limit is so high that everything that they see seems like blurs. They never see objects; they only see colors. Our speed limit isnt as high as theirs is, but people usually go much faster than the speed limit is. Another reason their society reflects the one we live in is that the people there are becoming more and more violent towards each other. Clarisse tells Montag that shes “afraid of children my own age. They kill each other… Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks.
Im afraid of them and they dont like me because Im afraid” (30). They even have a Window Smasher place and a Car Wrecker place where children can go and smash windows or reck cars instead of ruining cars or windows of people in the city. In our society, one cant turn on the television without hearing about a teenager shooting another teenager or teenagers going on a rampage and shooting in local school. Kids in your society are just as dangerous as the kids in Clarisses society. The society we live in now is a reflection of the society in which Bradbury wrote about in Fahrenheit 451.
They are technologically advanced, more than we are, but at the rate that companies are producing more advanced machinery, we will soon be at the same place as they are. The children living in their society have become very violent towards one another. They kill others and wreck things just for the fun of it. The children of our society are becoming more and more like they are. Kids egg houses, key cars, kill children just to have a good time. Bradbury did a nice job predicted what the society would be like in the future.