Imaginary Worlds - Books Under Fire

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

Book banning is hitting libraries across America, and many of the titles being banned or challenged are fantasy books or graphic novels – especially LGBTQ content. Malinda Lo has been tracking how her work is being targeted, like her novel Ash which is a queer reimagining of Cinderella. I talk with Malinda about how she’s been tracking the attacks on her work and fighting back. Plus, we hear a version of my 2018 episode Fahrenheit 451 Still Burns featuring Neil Gaiman, whose work is currently banned in several states.  Go to incogni.com/imaginary and use the code IMAGINARY to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So what's it like to buy your first cryptocurrency on Kraken? Well, let's say I'm at a food truck I've never tried before. Am I going to go all in on the loaded taco? No, sir. I'm keeping it simple. Starting small. That's trading on Kraken. Pick from over 190 assets and start with the 10 bucks in your pocket. Easy. Go to Kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Non-investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss.

See Kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection. Free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils so whether you're going for a run or just running late do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't find secret at your nearest walmart or shoppers drug mart today you're listening to imaginary worlds a show about how we create them

and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Balinski. Book banning is all the rage in the U.S. The American Library Association said in 2023, the number of targeted books increased 92% from the previous year. And so far this year, book banning has continued to go up. And for all the books that get banned, there are also books that get challenged and haven't been

banned yet, or they survived the challenge and they've stayed on the shelves for now. Almost half the targeted books feature people of color or queer characters. And when I looked at the books being removed from libraries, I noticed that a lot of them are graphic novels or fantasy books. Some of the banned or challenged titles include The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and other works by Margaret Atwood, works by Neil Gaiman like American Gods and Sandman, graphic novels by Brian K. Vaughan, novels by Stephen King, Leigh Bardugo, Piers Anthony, and even Ray Bradbury. Books by George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien have been banned. The works of Sarah J. Moss have been banned over and over again. Her novels, like A Court of Thorns and Roses, are inspired by classic myths and fairy tales,

but from a more adult perspective. The author Melinda Lowe has been following this closely, because her books have also been banned and challenged. I came across Melinda's work last year when I was researching my episode on fairy godmothers. Melinda wrote a YA novel called Ash, which reimagines Cinderella with queer characters. Melinda has written about the attempts to ban her work, and I wanted to learn more about what she found and how she's dealing with it. First, I was curious, when did she find out that her books were being challenged? I think I learned this back in fall of 2021. being challenged? I think I learned this back in fall of 2021. That's when it really started ramping up back then. And that's when it became clear that because my books are all about LGBTQ

characters, they were really going to be in the target zone, so to speak. And tell me which books were being banned or challenged. Well, early on, there was the big law in Texas. Well, there was a letter from some Texas legislator that had a list of like 800 titles that he wanted banned. And that included my first novel, Ash, which is a lesbian retelling of Cinderella. So that was one of the first instances I heard of my books being banned. And later on, instances, I heard of my books being banned. And later on, almost all of my books have been challenged or banned in some capacity. Ash certainly has faced this more than once. The majority of the book bans I have faced have come from my historical novel, Last Night at the Telegraph Club. And you wrote that this doesn't make you feel

like personally hurt, but it concerns and worries you. Can you tell me a bit more about that? Yeah, you know, I think early on, a lot of the people who were concerned about book banning would ask authors, you know, how does this make you feel? Are you OK? And I don't take it personally necessarily, but it is very concerning because it is an assault on the First Amendment. It is very concerning because it is an assault on the First Amendment. And that is a fundamental element of being an American and living in this country. And it really felt very worrying to me because I am an immigrant. I came to this country as a child from China.

One of the things that I have always known is that my family came here so that we could have the freedom to speak freely, which was not available to my family in China. So to have this start to happen and to ramp up so seriously, it's quite concerning to me because this is literally the state, various states across the US saying that certain topics cannot be written about or published in books that are held in school and local libraries. And it's not just school libraries, I should say. This is expanding now to public libraries all across the country. Do you think that fantasy genres are treated differently or misunderstood? Because I mean, I know I've seen people say like, this graphic novel looks like a cartoon. And, you know, even if it's shelved in the adult section or the teen section, a kid could wander over and grab it. I'm wondering, like, do you

think that maybe even fantasy in general is being seen as like a Trojan horse that will deliver these dangerously subversive ideas to kids? I do think that graphic novels, graphic memoirs are definitely misunderstood because of the word graphic, which has many different meanings in the English language, but really it just means illustrated. And people who do not read books but want to ban them find it easier to look at pictures. Let me be real here. They can just flip through a graphic novel and find a picture that they interpret as being sexually explicit, for example, when it is not in the context of the entire graphic novel or memoir. Fantasy and genre fiction sometimes, I think, flies under the radar because people, adults,

don't take it as seriously as realistic fiction. But I don't know that that is the case with the book banning, because I do know some of the most banned titles are fantasy. My fantasy novels do not have any sexually explicit passages in them, but they do have queer characters. And a lot of times, these people who want to ban books, they don't really care if there's actually sex in it. They just don't want any mention of same-sex relationships or queer identity at all. They think that it catches or something. Like if their kid reads it, it will turn them gay. Yeah. I was wondering about that because I feel like there's a lot of fear around the imagination of kids. Are adults misremembering their youth or just underestimating kids' sense

of resilience and sense of self? I think that a lot of adults do misremember their youth, their childhood, and especially their adolescence. I think that adults sometimes once they become adults and they become parents, their memories change over what of what it was like for them as a kid. They do forget what it's like to be a kid and how magical an experience can be reading a book and how kids are really open to new things. I mean, when you're a kid, everything is new and finding the tiniest little connection to a story can be so world opening for a kid. So I think there is some fear there, but it's also misguided fear because reading about gay people is not going to make anyone gay.

Like this is not a thing that happens. It could give comfort and security to a kid who is already questioning their identity. And it could really help them to understand who they are. But if they are not already queer at some level in their own personhood, it's not going to turn them that way. I mean, I've read so many books with straight people in them. I'm not straight. You know, I'm a lesbian. Somehow reading all of those books did not you know, I'm a lesbian. Somehow reading all of those books did not make me straight. It did give me a lot of emotional difficulty when I came out. You know, it made me really, it was very hard to come out because there were so few representations of queer identities.

Well, do you think fantasy has a role in reaching younger readers in a way that's different from more realistic fiction, which I know all fiction is a form of fantasy and a form of a constructed world, but like magical fantasy? I think it depends on the kid. Some kids love fantasy and some kids don't. And when I was a kid, I loved fantasy. That's what I wanted to read. And that's probably because it gave me some escape from my ordinary regular life. And I could go on adventures and fight dragons or go into space, you know, and have adventures there. I loved to escape from my ordinary life as a kid. And if I had had the opportunity to read books with queer characters having these magical adventures, I think it would have been completely transformative. I mean, that's one of the

reasons I wrote Ash. It's because it's something that I wished I had had as a kid. So I loved all that magical stuff when I was a kid. I still love it. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because I did an episode on the Grimm Brothers and I did an episode on Fairy Godmothers where we looked at Cinderella specifically. Is that or did you want to pick Cinderella for that reason because it's a fairy tale that everybody knows and you can start with a structure of Cinderella? I did think that because it had a structure, that would mean that I would know what to write. That was a complete, it did not turn out that way at all. I mean, writing is never as straightforward as anyone imagines.

My first draft of Ash was straight. I mean, she fell in love with Prince Charming in the first draft. I had changed the fairy godmother to be a male fairy based on Irish folklore of the she, but she fell in love with Prince Charming. So then I had a friend read that draft and she said, you know, Ash, the main character, doesn't really have much chemistry with the prince. She really seems to like this other character. And that other character was a woman. And I was so stunned by this. I had not intended it at all. So I had to reread it. And I reread that first draft and I realized, oh my God, I have written a lesbian subtext

into my Cinderella retelling. So then I had to decide if I was going to turn it into a lesbian retelling of Cinderella, which this is like 2005. And I had never read anything like that. I thought it was bizarre. I did not think it would be publishable. So it took me a while to really get up the courage to do it. I really was afraid it would not make the book publishable. But it was fine. I mean, people loved it. The book had multiple offers and it's still alive today and

still finding new readers every year. So I think people were really hungry for that kind of story, to just have a queer character in a fairy tale, having a happy ending, not having to deal with homophobia or the real world, really. Or the tragic ending, too. hurt. But I imagine given your anxiety around publishing it, I know it's almost 20 years later, but I mean, there must be a sense of kind of like, this is kind of what you feared was going to happen in some way. It is a little bit, but I think that because now I'm so much many, many more years into my career, I kind of, I don't know, I'm kind of like, bring it, let's, let's go for it. You know, I, that's why when my publisher decided to sue the state of Iowa and asked if I would be a co-plaintiff in that case, I said yes. So now I'm part of a group of people, authors, teens, teachers, and librarians suing to block the Iowa state law that bans queer books, basically.

So I'm hoping that'll work. Yeah. I mean, I've seen people rally around challenged books and promote them. My local library actually in Brooklyn here has been doing that. I was going to ask you, has that happened with your books in a strange way? Is it called attention to it in a positive way? I don't think it has really had an effect in terms of sales, if that's what you're asking about. A lot of people think that when your book gets banned, that means you're going to hit the bestseller list. And that doesn't happen. I mean, when the vast majority of books that are banned and so far, thousands of books are being banned. Like you, you have not heard of these books. They're just quietly taken away from school libraries and removed. I mean, they're banned. They're not getting buzz. So I don't think that it has really made an effect in terms of sales. And I know that in fact, some schools in states like Florida and Texas are buying fewer LGBTQ books because of these laws. So I do not think it has any had any sort of positive effect. Have you gotten feedback from young readers who are saying, I was looking for your book,

you know, in the library and it's not there anymore? Or your book really, you know, helped me. I'm upset about this. I've gotten a lot of email and messages over the years from readers who say that my books have helped them to see who they are as a person, given them the confidence to come out to themselves, to come out to their families even sometimes, or come out to this girl they have a crush on. They're really wonderful stories. And it's amazing to me the power of fiction. I write a book alone in my house. It can be read by someone so far away who does not know me at all. And we can still have this connection through the story and the power of the words. It's really amazing.

You actually, there was one person as well, you quoted where they said that they were actually kind of moved by some of the relationships and Ash. And they're like, they actually started to almost advocate like this is beautiful. And they're like, but we have to we have to ban it. I mean, to tell me about that. Yeah, there was this mom who I don't I think it was a mom who had who had submitted a challenge for Ash in Texas. And one of the reporters who's been following this from the beginning tweeted it and tagged me. So that's the only reason I saw this challenge form. And the challenge form is a review of Ash in which the writer basically says they thought this book was beautifully written,

and the relationship between Ash and the woman she falls in love with was an example of the kind of love we want our children to have. But because they're two women, she could not allow her children to read it. And I just thought, this is so sad. I mean, I used to think that if someone actually read my books, they would understand that they should not be banned. And yet this person had read the book and concluded, oh, well, we still got to ban it. And that just shows me that literary quality has nothing to do with these book bans. It has nothing to do with how powerful a novel is. I mean, it's about their agenda. Their agenda is the thing that is driving this, not the books, not the stories. They don't care what the stories are. They just want to ban the concepts that they think these books are

pushing. Yeah, that's really heartbreaking, actually, just to think about that, you know, because you feel like as an artist, you're like, but but if you read the book, you know, you'll understand. I mean, that's just like, it's kind of heartbreaking to see it. It is. I mean, that that really was heartbreaking to see. I felt I felt really bad for that. That really was heartbreaking to see. I felt really bad for that woman's children. You know, that must be rough if you have a parent who thinks that. So are you now, I mean, is this something that you feel like, because I know you wrote one post and you're like, OK, this is my post.

And then you were like, OK, I have to write an update. Do you feel like this is something you're really invested in now? You're just going to keep tabs as this keeps going. I am invested in it because it's no one is coming to tell me if my book is being banned anywhere. And I want to know I want to know where my books are being banned. So I kind of have to track down the information. You know, I have to like read all the news articles and search for my book titles and search for the lists of books that are being challenged at school library websites. It's not there's no one no one's coming to tell me when things are happening.

And I want to know. I want to know what the reception is to my books being banned. And I'm gonna, I'm definitely gonna be here for the long haul until the books are no longer being banned. We can't, we can't stop. It's just, it's gotten so bad. So I did an episode in 2018.

It was actually called Fahrenheit 451 Still Burns. And at the time, I was surprised to learn that book banning still existed. I mean, that's how kind of not out of control it was six years ago. Did you ever do you ever think about Fahrenheit 451? Because you actually have an example of somebody saying they should burn your book. Yeah, no, I mean, that's it's rhetoric, right? Like they don't really mean it. I don't think they really mean it. I think that if someone actually burned the books, that would create such a horrible image that would immediately go viral all across social media today. I think it would not serve their cause. But the thought behind it and the motivation behind

all of these laws is certainly the beginnings of fascism, if not well into that. These are not laws that should exist in a democratic society. And that's the important thing. Some information should not be publicly available. Your home address, your social security number, your financial information. Every so often, I'll get an email telling me that there was a data breach on one of the sites that I use. And I'm like, should I be worried? How much of my information do they have? What are they going to do with it? And who are they? They are probably data brokers. Data brokers sell your information to companies or worse, cyber criminals. You have the right to protect your privacy by requesting that they delete your information, but it could take years for you to do it by yourself with every one of

these data brokers, and you'd have to keep checking up on them like a game of whack-a-mole. Incogni can give you peace of mind. Incogni will reach out to data brokers on your behalf and request that the information gets removed. They can deal with any objections from the other side, and they'll make sure your data stays off the market. Incogni can also give you updates on how many requests they've made and how many successful removals they've had. Go to incogni.com slash imaginary and use the code imaginary

to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. You can also find that link in the episode description. After my conversation with Melinda Lowe, I wondered if anyone had actually tried to burn books. I found a news report from several months ago about a candidate running for a local state office. She filmed herself using a flamethrower on two LGBTQ books, and she posted it on social media. She got backlash, but she relished in the controversy. Her supporters cheered her on using fire emojis. Even before I found that story, I couldn't stop thinking about Fahrenheit 451, the novel by Ray Bradbury, which takes place in the future, were fireman burn books.

As I mentioned earlier, I did an episode about Fahrenheit 451 back in 2018. Listening to that episode now, it resonates differently, which is eerie because I certainly didn't feel like 2018 was a time of innocence. So I put together a condensed version of that episode, which I'm going to play for you now. I started the episode by talking with a pretty famous author whose work is currently being banned or challenged across America. Yeah, can I have your levels again? This is me. This is me talking. This is me still talking. Peter Piper, Peter Piper, Peter Piper.

That is the voice of Neil Gaiman, master of modern fantasy. But he did not come to the studio to talk about the stuff he's best known for, like American Gods or Coraline. But the reason he agreed to come in to talk with me is because he's a huge fan of Ray Bradbury. I was asked to write the introduction to the 60th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury and I had known each other at that point for, I think, over 20 years. And he has a vivid memory of discovering Fahrenheit 451 when he was a kid. And he says he was particularly fascinated by the main character.

He was a fireman. And he says he was particularly fascinated by the main character. He was a fireman. He burned down houses of people with books. And that seemed a cool science fictional idea in itself because I lived in a world in which firemen came and saved you and they put out fires. And I didn't really understand things like his marriage falling apart. Huge swatches of the plot I missed,

but that's fine because when you're nine years old, you know that you're going to read the book later, and you'll take from it what is there for you. Fahrenheit 451 is the kind of novel that a lot of kids are assigned to read at some point in school. I was actually never assigned to read it, just by weird coincidence. So I never got around to it. But after the 2016 election, this old literary classic

jumped to the top of bestseller lists, along with other dystopian novels like 1984 and Animal Farm. So I finally read it. I couldn't believe how much the story, written 65 years ago, feels so relevant today. And I think that each of the characters in Fahrenheit 451 represents a challenge to the reader. If you lived in this world, what would you do?

Who would you be? Rich Orlow has thought about that a lot. I do have the ability, you know, pat yourself on the back, but to sort of morph myself into other characters. For the last decade, he's been performing a one-man show of Fahrenheit 451 using a script that was approved by Ray Bradbury before Bradbury died in 2012. Now, Rich does all the voices in the show, but the character he says he identifies with the most is Guy Montag, the main character, the fireman, who starts to question why he's burning books.

You know, he goes from someone who is kind of destructive, thinks he knows it all, he's kind of angry, but there's a core in him that tells him that there's something more than this. And that's kind of how I was when I was young. I was kind of a not the happiest kid. That's for sure. I was very angry. I grew up in not the best circumstances per se. And he doesn't know anything. Eventually, at the end of the book, he says, I was an idiot the whole way. I can identify with that, you know. So here's Rich performing a scene where Montag reveals for the first time to his wife Millie that he's unhappy with his work. When I wake up, I have chills and a fever. Oh, you can't be sick. You were all right last night. Millie, do you know what happened last night? We burned a thousand books.

We burnt a woman. Well? Well? Well, you should have seen her, Millie. God, there's got to be things in books. Things that you can't imagine to make a woman stay in a burning house. You wouldn't stay for nothing. She was as rational as you and I, and we burnt her. Have you ever seen a burning house. It wouldn't stay for nothing. She was as rational as you and I, and we burnt her.

Have you ever seen a burning house? It smolders for days. I've been trying to put it out in my mind. I'm crazy with trying, and I'm sick. And it's not just the woman that died. I'm thinking about all the kerosene that I have used in the past 10 years, and I am thinking about those books. And for the first time, I realized that there was a man behind each one of those books. A man had to think them up. A man had to put them down on paper. It may have taken some man a lifetime

to put his thoughts down on paper and then along I come in two minutes and boom, it's all over. Oh, leave me alone. I didn't do anything to you. Wow, that was chilling. Thank you. So, wow, it's so interesting to hear Millie. When I think of Millie, I mean, Millie is, she self-medicates.

I mean, the whole book, she's kind of, you know, she's half out of it. Her character never really confronts the really underlying cause of all these things. And she distracts herself with television, and that's her life. She even calls them her TV family. Now the opposite of Millie, who just kind of goes along with the program, is Montag's next-door neighbor, Clarice McClellan. She only appears in the beginning of the book, but she plays a pivotal role. She awakens Montag's conscience.

You know, I'm not afraid of you at all. So many people are. They're afraid of firemen, but you are just a man after all. How long have you worked at being a fireman? Since I was 20. Ten years ago. Do you ever read any of the books that you burn? No. That's against the law.

Oh, yes, of course. Hey, it's fine work. Monday you burn Edna Millay. Wednesday, Walt Whitman. Friday, Faulkner. You burn them to ashes and then you burn the ashes. That's our official slogan. Is it true that a long time ago firemen used to put out fires instead of going to start them? No. That's strange, because I heard that houses used to burn by accident, and they needed firemen to stop the flames. Now the fourth major character in the book is Montag's boss, the anti-intellectual Captain Beattie.

We must all be alike. Not everybody born free and equal like the Constitution says, but everybody made equal. Each man the image of every other. For then, all are happy. For there are no mountains to judge yourself against or to make you cower. So, a book is a loaded weapon in the house next door. Burn it. Burn it. Who knows who may be the target of a well-read man. Now that is actually a very important moment, because Beattie reveals

something to Montag which may be surprising to some readers. It was actually surprising to me the first time I read the book. This whole book burning business did not come from the government, at least not at first. It came from the people. Every book contained something that somebody found offensive. So firemen began burning the most offensive books, the people cheered, and they kept going. When the houses were finally fireproofed completely, there was no longer a need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given a new job, as the custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our rightful dread of being inferior. Official censors, judges, and executioners. That is you, Montaub.

And that's me. Jonathan Eller is the director for the Center of Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University. And he says book banning was very much on Bradbury's mind when he wrote Fahrenheit 451 in the early 1950s on the eve of the McCarthy hearings.

Ray Bradbury felt that the ban on books or the censorship of books would probably start with supernatural literature and fantasy. And so he started to write a series of about a half a dozen stories in the late 40s that touched on the issue of the banning of supernatural fiction or the burning of supernatural fiction. Did I read that he was descended from Mary Bradbury, who's one of the people in the Salem Witch Trials? Oh, yes. Mary Bradbury was his direct ancestor. She was tried, of course, in the early 1690s, found guilty of taking on spectral forms.

I think it was the form of a wild boar someone accused her of. She was found guilty and sentenced to die. But over time, the colonial government changed and she was spared. But Ray Bradbury's initial spark of inspiration for Fahrenheit 451 came from personal experience. One night, he was walking with a friend in Los Angeles and a policeman stopped and questioned them because apparently it was strange to just be walking at night in Los Angeles. Bradbury was so annoyed, he wrote a short story called The Pedestrian, which took place in a totalitarian future where people were so distracted by technology they didn't even bother going out of their houses and take a walk.

And that short story eventually evolved into the world of Fahrenheit 451, where technology is so all-consuming and distracting, people don't even read books anymore. And one of the most endearing details about Fahrenheit 451 is that Bradbury wrote the novel on a coin-operated typewriter at his local library. When it was done, he called the fire department to ask what temperature a book would burn. They told him 451 degrees, and that's how he got the title. When it was finally published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 was considered a success, critically and commercially. But it was not seen as an instant classic. For a long time, other Ray Bradbury books, like the Martian Chronicles, were much more popular. But by the 80s and 90s, as we're dealing with these technological marvels, and we have the challenge of preserving unmediated literature and great ideas.

People began to see that to remind us all that literacy is important. Then Fahrenheit began to become a staple in school. But according to the American Library Association, every year there are parents lobbying them to remove Fahrenheit 451 from the shelves of school libraries because they claim it has offensive language like hell or damn, which is a little strange because there are other books with hell and damn that are not constantly the target of such anxiety among parents. In fact, for a while, there was an edited version of Fahrenheit 451

that was circulated in schools that had words like hell and damn removed. And when Bradbury himself found out, he was furious. He got the original text reinstated and wrote a new coda that's in every copy of the book. It's a coda in which he says at the end, I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book. And here is Ray Bradbury himself. I get letters from teachers all the time saying, my books have been banned temporarily. I said, don't worry about it. Put them back on the shelves. And they come in and find them on the shelves again. And you say, gee, how'd they get back on there? And you keep putting them back, and they keep taking them off,

and you finally win. But be very quiet about it, and don't ask for my help, because if I come to your town to help you, I'm a big frog in a small puddle, and they're going to hate me, all of them, all the people. So you can't ask me to interfere. You do the job. You're the librarian. You All the people. So you can't ask me to interfere. You do the job. You're the librarian.

You're the teacher. Stand firm and you'll win. And they always do. Own each step with Peloton. From their pop runs to walk and talks, you define what it means to be a runner. Whatever your level, embrace it. Journey starts when you say so.

If you've got five minutes or 50, Peloton Tread has workouts you can work in. Or bring your classes with you for outdoor runs, walks, and hikes led by expert instructors on the Peloton app. Call yourself a runner. Peloton All Access membership separate. Learn more at onepeloton.ca slash running. OnePeloton.ca slash running. Now, part of what helped Fahrenheit 451 endure was the way that it got adapted. It's been turned into a graphic novel, movies, play. Now, don't make me use this.

There have been radio drama adaptations on both sides of the Atlantic. Well, that's one way to get an audience at the end of a flamethrower. Phil Nichols teaches TV and film at the University of Wolverhampton in the UK. His specialty are media adaptations of Ray Bradbury's work. I think if all the adaptations were straightforward, faithful adaptations, I would get very tired. But they've all been so different and so playful. And strangely enough, the first film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 did not come from Hollywood. The 1966 film was directed by Francois Truffaut. It's a very strange film. It's a combination of French New Wave filmmaking

and an American story. And it was shot in England, and it was directed by a director who didn't speak a word of English, even though the film was made in English. And the actor playing Montag had a thick Austrian accent. We burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes. That's our official motto. You don't like books then? Books are just so much rubbish. The writer Neil Gaiman was never a big fan of that movie,

and he was particularly disturbed by the ending. Now, to some extent, the ending of the movie is similar to the book. Montag quits the fire department, and he joins the resistance, where he discovers the, quote,

book people, who invented a really ingenious way to preserve books. Each of them chooses a book to memorize. I think in the book, you can almost hear the trumpets as people are introduced, as you realize that, yes, you can destroy a book, but you cannot destroy the content of the book. And as long as some books are people, the books are inside us and we can bring them out again. Would you like to read Plato's Republic? Yes, of course.

Well, I am Plato's Republic. Would you like to read Marcus Aurelius? Well, Mr. Simmons is Marcus. This fella's Charles Darwin. He's Schopenhauer. Others are Einstein, Confucius, Buddha, Jefferson, Lincoln, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In the film, nobody is telling the content of their book to another person. And I think that is the thing that makes it seem like madness, like a waste of time, like pointless. They're all on their own, not making eye contact with each other, mumbling their stories, mumbling their books that they've remembered. The one thing that I don't think Fahrenheit 451 warns us about enough,

which is, because why would it have done? Which is, it seems to me like the best way to lose the good books and to lose literacy and to lose all those points of view is not to burn them, but it's to bury them under a million bad books. And, you know, we're now at a point where more data is being produced every hour than was being produced in the previous centuries. hour than was being produced in the previous centuries. You know, in the old days, you needed a guide through the desert to find the one flower growing in the desert of information, of knowledge, of story. And now we're wandering through an overgrown jungle, and we need a flamethrower just to clear out the weeds and a map to try and find where the good stuff is. Ray Bradbury always had mixed feelings about the Truffaut film.

But he wrote a play in the 1970s that incorporated a lot of ideas that Truffaut had invented for the film into Bradbury's new theatrical version of Fahrenheit 451. the film into Bradbury's new theatrical version of Fahrenheit 451. But the biggest change that Bradbury made was something brand new that did not come from the Truffaut film. He took the character of Captain Beatty, who had been sort of a two-dimensional villain in the book, and made him more of an anti-hero. Jonathan Eller says this actually came from Bradbury's own insecurities as a writer. He always worried the most about writing character. He knew that he had very interesting ideas based on basic fears and hopes and aspirations and terrors and loves of human beings. But sometimes he had to work very hard to develop characters.

And all the work that Ray Bradbury did on the character of Captain Beatty struck a chord with Julia Wilhelm. In the spring of 2018, she was a senior at McKinney-Boyd High School outside Dallas. And when she learned that her drama teacher was going to put on the play of Fahrenheit 451. I read the script and the character that I really wanted to play was Beatty. And because it was the most complex and contradictory character in the show, kind of like an Aaron Burr, like a Judas, you know. Now, I wanted to hear from these kids because I was curious, how does Fahrenheit 451 hold up today?

I mean, how do kids who were born in the 21st century relate to this story? Julia Wilhelm's teacher, Jonathan Pitzer, was wondering the same thing. That's why for this play, he didn't do the usual auditions. He interviewed the kids to find out how deeply they had thought about Fahrenheit 451. And he was totally blown away when Julia came in. She came with notes, and she had like a PowerPoint, and she had drawings of the characters, and she had really put in the time for Captain Beatty.

And I told her, I said, you know, you know that's a man, right? And she said, yeah, but it doesn't have to be. That's the part I want. And Julia's pitch for the character was really interesting. She said, what if Clarice McClellan, the idealistic girl who lives next to Montag, didn't die as a martyr, as she does in the book, or turn into a resistance fighter, as she does in the movie and the play? What if she became cynical?

What if that is the type of person that Captain Beatty used to be before she became an adult? As this world is changing and people aren't listening to each other, she sees books and they offer no comfort to her, no solace, no peace. That's actually one of the lines. And she doesn't see books as helping her anymore. And because she doesn't think the answer is in books, she looks to the government or these restrictions because books haven't fixed the terrible things that have happened to her. She says, well, might as well burn them. Once, Montag, we were a small country, but then we grew. This is Jilly Wilhelm performing as Captain Beattie. And by the millions they poured in upon us. And finally, you have 300 million doctors, lawyers,

Baptists, block-headed Swedes, beer-fat Germans. Blacks don't like Little Black Sambo? Burn it. White people hate Uncle Tom's Cabin? Burn it. The Jews hate Fagin and Oliver Twist? Burn Fagin. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice? Women's Lib hates that. Into the furnace. More comic books, more gossip, plenty of facts, but no meaning. And there you have it, Montag. Lecture's over.

Fahrenheit 451 has grown beyond being just a book. It's an idea. It's a living document that's taken on a life of its own. Ideas are resilient, especially good ideas. They can be more powerful than any author, book, movie, or play. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Melinda Lowe and everyone who appeared in my episode about Fahrenheit 451. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like the show, please give us a shout out

on social media or leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or tell a friend who you think might like the show. The best way to support Imaginary Worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either free Imaginary World stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can also get access

to an ad-free version through Patreon or buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.