Over the last couple of months, Glenn has talked about how he has been re-reading 20th century science fiction books like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and finding remarkably frightening parallels to today.
“It is amazing to me how much of our science fiction is coming true now, how much of what we were warned about in 1984, in Brave New World. And I'm reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 right now,” Glenn said on radio this morning. “I mean, it is reading like a newspaper. It is reading like our conversations that we're having in America now. You won't believe how you can take Ray Bradbury and pull it off the shelves and you can read it like a newspaper. Everything that our science fiction writers warned about is here.”
To prove his point, Glenn decided to read an excerpt from Fahrenheit 451. “I want you to listen to science fiction,” Glenn said. “Now, science fiction is not a predictor of the future. [The authors] take trends that they see and then they put them in the world that they're in now. So this is 1950. And so you'll hear things are swell because it's 1950. I want you to listen to this. This is the fireman who goes and burns books. And so it's the fireman talking to this 17‑year‑old girl on the way home. And people don't talk to each other anymore.”
Watch Glenn read the excerpt in the clip below:
“Is that not a conversation that is so close to the conversation many Americans are having today,” Glenn asked. “And that was written by Ray Bradbury in [1953], a warning to the world.”