by Ray Bradbury
Books are illegal in Bradbury's world, but books are not what his fictional -- yet extremely plausible -- government fears: They fear the knowledge one pulls from books. Through the government's incessant preaching, the inhabitants of this place have come to loathe books and fear those who keep and attempt to read them. They see such people as eccentric, dangerous, and threatening to the tranquility of their state.
But one day a fireman named Montag meets a young girl who demonstrates to him the beauty of books, of knowledge, of conceiving and sharing ideas; she wakes him up, changing his life forever. When Montag's previously held ideology comes crashing down around him, he is forced to reconsider the meaning of his existence and the part he plays. After Montag discovers that "all isn't well with the world," he sets out to make things right.
Ray Bradbury is classified as a science-fiction writer, although only about one third of his work is truly "science-fiction." He is more appropriately described as a moralist of fantasy.
Bradbury claims to remember everything that has ever happened to him, from the exact moment he was born. He uses this keen sense of life to produce purposefully philosophical stories which can as easily stem from his readings of John Huston, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Ernest Hemingway, as from his trips to Mexico and Ireland or his work for Disney Corporation. His keen perception and insight allows him to take the smallest detail of his life and turn it into the most important aspect of a story.
Although he writes mainly stories of speculation, his stories are all solidly grounded in reality. Wisdom of himself and the world around him provide the form for accurate descriptions of possible futuristic situations. His stories are of past experiences, present directions and attitudes, and future considerations and dangers all at once.