Ray Bradbury’s World Has Arrived

Ray Bradbury’s World

 I didn’t think I’d live to see the day when the story Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury became a reality, but it is here.

If you have not read the story, or seen the film, here is a shortened version. The story’s main theme is about a world where books are banned, and firefighters go around not putting out the fires but burning books.
Why would you read the book, as it was written in the 1960s? Because it is still a classic of science fiction, despite its age.

This was thought to be science fiction, but it has become fact in the UK, not the burning of the books but the death of literature with so many cities closing libraries and the young relying more on their mobile phones, and playing online games which will write the history of this age?

Several years ago, I wrote an online serial for two months, and despite it being free, nobody was interested in my characters other than me; when I stopped writing the serial, it had a long way to go, but with less than a dozen readers per week what was the point of writing?

I was interested in the story that I thought of several off-shoot serials I could have written. I did start some but then gave them up as I thought, what’s the point when there is no interest?

From my experience, I can tell you that being a writer is a thankless task; even though I sold over 800 eBooks, I never received a word of thanks; this goes for when I used to use my talents in writing blurbs to promote other writers. Not that any gave me help in my sales.

My talent helped one man in Swansea get a writing contract, and another young lady gets a contract for her book series. One of my contacts in Australia had his book sales rise from 20 a month to over 200 a month with my help. For me, nothing happened, only years of fighting the odds to sell a few ebooks to try to keep faith in my writing ability in a world that only wants to read stories for free, as shown by my “sales” on Draft2Digital where the only books people take from my pages are the free samples which were supposed to entice sales for my stock, but that never happened.

I have been selling on Amazon for a decade, and my best-selling eBook has only sold 24 copies; that is because twice it sold six in a day; other than that, my top eBook has sold less than a dozen copies.

I used to lose days when I write stories; now I spend my time watching Spanish movies and TV series; for a while, I missed the worlds I created, then I came to realise that as nobody bought the eBooks, there was no point going on, this gave me some peace of mind.

There is a certain degree of irony with my sales: the eBooks that have been sold were written before I paid for the editing software from Grammarly. In the beginning, I wrote as I was thinking the story in my mind, with no thoughts about the grammar.
It makes you wonder what is the next science fiction to become science?

In a lifetime, mobile phones have come from Star Trek to be an everyday item.
Will there come a day when the film Logan’s Run becomes a reality, and people over 30 are hunted down and killed?

Already many firms consider people in their 40’s to be too old to employ.
In the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project, two computers formed a link and ran themselves even after being unplugged.

With the advances in robotics, will the day of the series Humans arrive? A time when not only do androids look like us, they can do what we do and without tiring. A day when humans are replaced totally by robots, don’t dismiss the concept.

The question is, who watches those who watch us?
Robert Oppenheimer always said in the days after Hiroshima he wished he’d never split the atom. If he hadn’t, somebody would have done it sooner or later. I know it caused a lot of deaths but think of the thousands of lives the bombs saved.

If the Americans had had to fight for the islands as they fought for Iwo Jima, then there would have been many thousands of lives lost. The thing you need to remember is there is no word for surrender in Japanese. It is considered a great dishonour to give up. That is why one man lived in the jungles of Malaya for two decades, not believing the war had ended; he said he would only give up if the emperor told him to. He never believed the emperor had died.