Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is the American answer to the English dystopias of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The novel is famous for depicting a society in which firemen do not extinguish fires but start them. The title, we are told, is the temperature at which paper ignites, for the firemen burn books, which are prohibited to own or read. Instead, the public immerse themselves in wall-to-wall television circuits, where they converse with their ‘parlour family’, recreate social life by performing in interactive, televised plays, and engross themselves in radio transmissions broadcast to their inner-ear Seashells. In François Truffaut's 1966 film treatment, the interactive communications network is called The Family, and each of its users is a Cousin, whose social horizon consists of statistics about books destroyed daily (by their poundage rather than content or number), broadcast commercials, instructional films and Family plays. Bradbury and Truffaut follow a fireman, Montag (Oskar Werner in the film), whose disillusion with society, inspired by his neighbour, Clarisse (Julie Christie), imperils both his domestic and his professional life, represented by his wife, Mildred (renamed Linda in the film, also played by Julie Christie), and Captain Beatty (simply called The Captain, played by Cyril Cusack). Fahrenheit 451 imagines a society where minority pressure groups and mass communications technology have evolved into a concordance between masses and the State. Culturally and historically depthless, the fragile texture of a society governed by technology and simulacra is regulated not by an authoritarian State, but by the public themselves – what Baudrillard calls the simulation pact.

Received wisdom tells us that Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopia. For Raymond Williams, what made Bradbury's ‘powerful social fiction’ was its crystalised ‘pattern taken from contemporary society’ (2010: 45) – that of post-war America and mass society. The tenor of the novel very clearly comes from the vilification of mass society compared to Leavisite minority culture. But, for Williams, both book burning and televisions are distractions from the ‘actual and developed world’ which the story captures, ‘rather than in the given, unconnected future’ (ibid. 16–17).