Dangerous

As well as listening to music, I’ve been reading dangerous fiction.

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of facts they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy…. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

What was it Clarisse had said one afternoon? No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over…. [They] didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think….

Ibid.

For the violence has come into its own now; the violence I examined, and at times projected and predicted, has become today’s commonplace and accepted reality. This, to me, is far more terrifying than anything I could possibly imagine.

from Robert Bloch’s introduction to A Toy for Juliette, quoted by Harlan Ellison in Dangerous Visions