When François Truffaut Made a Film Adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

The pro­tag­o­nist of Ray Brad­bury’s Fahren­heit 451 is a “fire­man” tasked with incin­er­at­ing what few books remain in a domes­tic-screen-dom­i­nat­ed future soci­ety forced into illit­er­a­cy. Late in life, Ray Brad­bury declared that he wrote the nov­el because he was “wor­ried about peo­ple being turned into morons by TV.” This tinges with a cer­tain irony giv­en that the lat­est adap­ta­tion was made for HBO (2018). That project, which one crit­ic likened it to “a Glax­o­SmithK­line pro­duc­tion of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,” will prob­a­bly not be the last Fahren­heit 451 movie. Nor was it the first: that title goes to the one Nou­velle Vague auteur François Truf­faut’s film direct­ed in 1966, though many count that as a dubi­ous hon­or.

A con­tem­po­rary review in Time mag­a­zine mem­o­rably called Truf­faut’s Fahren­heit 451 a “weird­ly gay lit­tle pic­ture that assails with both hor­ror and humor all forms of tyran­ny over the mind of man,” albeit one that “strong­ly sup­ports the wide­ly held sus­pi­cion that Julie Christie can­not actu­al­ly act.”

Truf­faut bold­ly cast Christie in a dual role, as both pro­tag­o­nist Ray Mon­tag’s TV-and-pill-addict­ed wife and the young rebel who even­tu­al­ly lures him over to the pro-book lib­er­a­tion move­ment. Though some view­ers see it as the pic­ture’s fatal flaw, Scott Tobias, writ­ing at The Dis­solve, calls it a “mas­ter­stroke” that ren­ders the near­ly iden­ti­cal char­ac­ters “the abstract rep­re­sen­ta­tives of con­for­mi­ty and non-con­for­mi­ty they had always been in the book.”

It’s easy to imag­ine what appeal the source mate­r­i­al would have held for Truf­faut, the most lit­er­ary-mind­ed leader of the French New Wave; recall the shrine to Balzac kept by young Antoine Doinel in Truf­faut’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal debut The 400 Blows. By the time he went to work on Fahren­heit 451, his sixth fea­ture, he’d become what the Amer­i­can behind-the-scenes trail­er calls an “inter­na­tion­al­ly famous French direc­tor.” But this time, cir­cum­stances con­spired against him: his increas­ing­ly frac­tious rela­tion­ship with Jules and Jim star Oskar Wern­er did the lat­ter’s per­for­mance as Mon­tag no favors, and the mon­ey hav­ing come from the U.K. forced him to work in Eng­lish, a lan­guage of which he had scant com­mand at the time.

Truf­faut him­self enu­mer­ates these and oth­er dif­fi­cul­ties in a pro­duc­tion diary pub­lished over sev­er­al issues of Cahiers du Ciné­ma (begin­ning with num­ber 175). Yet near­ly six decades lat­er, his trou­bled inter­pre­ta­tion of Fahren­heit 451 still fas­ci­nates. New York­er crit­ic Richard Brody calls it “one of Truffaut’s wildest films, a cold­ly flam­boy­ant out­pour­ing of visu­al inven­tion in the ser­vice of lit­er­ary pas­sion and artis­tic mem­o­ry as well as a repu­di­a­tion of a world of uni­form con­ve­nience and com­fort­able con­for­mi­ty.” Today we may won­der why the paraso­cial rela­tion­ship Mon­tag’s wife anx­ious­ly main­tains with her tele­vi­sion, which must have seemed fan­tas­ti­cal in the mid-six­ties, feels dis­com­fit­ing­ly famil­iar — and how long it will be before Fahren­heit 451 gets re-adapt­ed as a binge-ready pres­tige TV dra­ma.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Truf­faut Became Truf­faut: From Pet­ty Thief to Great Auteur

Ralph Steadman’s Hell­ish Illus­tra­tions for Ray Bradbury’s Clas­sic Dystopi­an Nov­el Fahren­heit 451

Behold Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries

Why Should We Read Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451? A New TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion Explains

Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Behold Soviet Animations of Ray Bradbury Stories

Sergei Bon­darchuk direct­ed an 8‑hour film adap­ta­tion of War and Peace (1966–67), which end­ed up win­ning an Oscar for Best For­eign Pic­ture. When he was in Los Ange­les as a guest of hon­or at a par­ty, Hol­ly­wood roy­al­ty like John Wayne, John Ford, and Bil­ly Wilder lined up to meet the Russ­ian film­mak­er. But the only per­son that Bon­darchuk was tru­ly excit­ed to meet was Ray Brad­bury. Bon­darchuk intro­duced the author to the crowd of bemused A‑listers as “your great­est genius, your great­est writer!”

Ray Brad­bury spent a life­time craft­ing sto­ries about robots, Mar­tians, space trav­el and nuclear doom and, in the process, turned the for­mer­ly dis­rep­utable genre of Sci-Fi/­Fan­ta­sy into some­thing respectable. He influ­enced legions of writ­ers and film­mak­ers on both sides of the Atlantic from Stephen King to Neil Gaiman to Fran­cois Truf­faut, who adapt­ed his most famous nov­el, Fahren­heit 451, into a movie.

That film wasn’t the only adap­ta­tion of Bradbury’s work, of course. His writ­ings have been turned into fea­ture films, TV movies, radio shows and even a video game for the Com­modore 64. Dur­ing the wan­ing days of the Cold War, a hand­ful of Sovi­et ani­ma­tors demon­strat­ed their esteem for the author by adapt­ing his short sto­ries.

Vladimir Sam­sonov direct­ed Bradbury’s Here There Be Tygers, which you can see above. A space­ship lands on an Eden-like plan­et. The humans inside are on a mis­sion to extract all the nat­ur­al resources pos­si­ble from the plan­et, but they quick­ly real­ize that this isn’t your ordi­nary rock. “This plan­et is alive,” declares one of the char­ac­ters. Indeed, not only is it alive but it also has the abil­i­ty to grant wish­es. Want to fly? Fine. Want to make streams flow with wine? Sure. Want to sum­mon a nubile maid­en from the earth? No prob­lem. Every­one seems enchant­ed by the plan­et except one dark-heart­ed jerk who seems hell-bent on com­plet­ing the mis­sion.

Samsonov’s movie is styl­ized, spooky and rather beau­ti­ful – a bit like as if Andrei Tarkovsky had direct­ed Avatar.

Anoth­er one of Bradbury’s shorts, There Will Come Soft Rain, has been adapt­ed by Uzbek direc­tor Naz­im Tyuh­ladziev (also spelled Noz­im To’laho’jayev). The sto­ry is about an auto­mat­ed house that con­tin­ues to cook and clean for a fam­i­ly of four unaware that they all per­ished in a nuclear explo­sion. While Bradbury’s ver­sion works as a com­ment on both Amer­i­can con­sumerism and gen­er­al Cold War dread, Tyuhladziev’s ver­sion goes for a more reli­gious tact. The robot that runs the house looks like a mechan­i­cal snake (Gar­den of Eden, any­one?). The robot and the house become undone by an errant white dove. The ani­ma­tion might not have the pol­ish of a Dis­ney movie, but it is sur­pris­ing­ly creepy and poignant.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Beau­ti­ful, Inno­v­a­tive & Some­times Dark World of Ani­mat­ed Sovi­et Pro­pa­gan­da (1925–1984)

Enjoy 15+ Hours of the Weird and Won­der­ful World of Post Sovi­et Russ­ian Ani­ma­tion

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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Frank Herbert Explains the Origins of Dune (1969)

Dune: Part Two has been play­ing in the­aters for less than a week, but that’s more than enough time for its view­ers to joke about the apt­ness of its title. For while it comes, of course, as the sec­ond half of Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s adap­ta­tion of Frank Her­bert’s influ­en­tial sci-fi nov­el, it also con­tains a great many heaps of sand. Such visu­als hon­or not just the sto­ry’s set­ting, but also the form of Her­bert’s inspi­ra­tion to write Dune and its sequels in the first place. The idea for the whole saga came about, he says in the 1969 inter­view above, because he’d want­ed to write an arti­cle “about the con­trol of sand dunes.”

“I’m always fas­ci­nat­ed by the idea of some­thing that is either seen in minia­ture and that can be expand­ed to the macro­cosm or which, but for the dif­fer­ence in time, in the flow rate, and the entropy rate, is sim­i­lar to oth­er fea­tures which we wouldn’t think were sim­i­lar,” he goes on to explain. When viewed the right way, sand dunes turn out to behave “like waves in a large body of water; they just are slow­er. And the peo­ple treat­ing them as flu­id learn to con­trol them.” After enough research on this sub­ject, “I had some­thing enor­mous­ly inter­est­ing going for me about the ecol­o­gy of deserts, and it was — for a sci­ence fic­tion writer, any­way — it was an easy step from that to think: What if I had an entire plan­et that was a desert?”

That may have turned out to be one of the defin­ing ideas of Dune, but there are plen­ty of oth­ers in there with it. “We all know that many reli­gions began in a desert atmos­phere,” Her­bert says, “so I decid­ed to put the two togeth­er because I don’t think that any one sto­ry should have any one thread. I build on a lay­er tech­nique, and of course putting in reli­gion and reli­gious ideas you can play one against the oth­er.” And “of course, in study­ing sand dunes, you imme­di­ate­ly get into not just the Ara­bi­an mys­tique but the Nava­jo mys­tique and the mys­tique of the Kala­hari prim­i­tives and all.” From his tech­ni­cal curios­i­ty about sand, the sto­ry’s host of eco­log­i­cal, reli­gious, lin­guis­tic, polit­i­cal, and indeed civ­i­liza­tion­al themes emerged.

Con­duct­ed in Her­bert’s Fair­fax, Cal­i­for­nia home in 1969 by lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor and sci­ence-fic­tion enthu­si­ast Willis E. McNel­ly (who would lat­er com­pile The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia), the inter­view goes down a num­ber of intel­lec­tu­al byways that will be fas­ci­nat­ing to curi­ous fans. In its eighty min­utes, Her­bert reflects on every­thing from cor­po­ra­tions to hip­pies, the tarot to Zen, and Lawrence of Ara­bia to John F. Kennedy. The late pres­i­den­t’s then-just-begin­ning sanc­ti­fi­ca­tion in Amer­i­ca gets him talk­ing about one of Dune’s threads in par­tic­u­lar, about the “way a mes­si­ah is cre­at­ed in our soci­ety.” The ele­va­tion of a mes­si­ah is an act of myth-mak­ing, after all, and “man must rec­og­nize the myth he is liv­ing in.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia: The Con­tro­ver­sial, Defin­i­tive Guide to the World of Frank Herbert’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece (1984)

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

The Dune Fran­chise Tries Again — Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #110

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How Jane Austen Changed Fiction Forever

Though Jane Austen has­n’t pub­lished a nov­el since 1817 — with her death that same year being a rea­son­able excuse — her appeal as a lit­er­ary brand remains prac­ti­cal­ly unpar­al­leled in its class. This cen­tu­ry has offered its own film and tele­vi­sion ver­sions of all her major nov­els from Sense and Sen­si­bil­i­ty to Per­sua­sion, and even minor ones like San­di­tion and Lady Susan. As for the loos­er adap­ta­tions and Austen-inspired works in oth­er media, it would be dif­fi­cult even to count them. But to under­stand why Austen endures, we must go back to Austen her­self: to nov­els, that is, and to the enter­tain­ing­ly inno­v­a­tive man­ner in which she wrote them.

At the begin­ning of her very first book says Evan Puschak, Austen “did some­thing that changed fic­tion for­ev­er.” Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, has in his lat­est video cho­sen Sense and Sen­si­bil­i­ty as an exam­ple with which to explain the key tech­nique that set its author’s work apart. When, in the scene in ques­tion, the dying Hen­ry Dash­wood makes his son John promise to take care of his three half-sis­ters, the younger man inward­ly resolves to him­self to give them a thou­sand pounds each. “Yes, he would give them three thou­sand pounds,” Austen writes. “It would be lib­er­al and hand­some! It would be enough to make them com­plete­ly easy. Three thou­sand pounds! He could spare so lit­tle a sum with a lit­tle incon­ve­nience.”

What, exact­ly, is going on here? Before this pas­sage, Puschak explains, “the nar­ra­tor is describ­ing the thoughts and feel­ings of John Dash­wood.” But then, “some­thing changes: it’s sud­den­ly as if we’re inside John’s mind. And yet, the point of view does­n’t change: we’re still in the third per­son.” This is a notable ear­ly exam­ple of what’s called “free indi­rect style,” which lit­er­ary crit­ic D. A. Miller describes as a “tech­nique of close writ­ing that Austen more or less invent­ed for the Eng­lish nov­el.” When she employs it, “the nar­ra­tion’s way of say­ing is con­stant­ly both mim­ic­k­ing, and dis­tanc­ing itself from, the char­ac­ter’s way of see­ing.”

In his book Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, Miller pays a good deal of atten­tion to the lat­er Emma, with its “unprece­dent­ed promi­nence of free indi­rect style.” When, in Austen’s hand, that style “mim­ics Emma’s thoughts and feel­ings, it simul­ta­ne­ous­ly inflects them into keen­er obser­va­tions of its own; for our ben­e­fit, if nev­er for hers, it iden­ti­fies, ridicules, cor­rects all the secret van­i­ties and self-decep­tions of which Emma, pleased as Punch, remains com­i­cal­ly uncon­scious. And this is gen­er­al­ly what being a char­ac­ter in Austen means: to be slapped sil­ly by a nar­ra­tion whose con­stant bat­ter­ing; how­ev­er sat­is­fy­ing — or ter­ri­fy­ing — to read­ers, its recip­i­ent is kept from even notic­ing.” Austen may have been a nov­el­ist of great tech­ni­cal pro­fi­cien­cy and social acu­ity, but she also under­stood the eter­nal human plea­sure of shar­ing a laugh at the delu­sion­al behind their back.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Jane Austen

Down­load the Major Works of Jane Austen as Free eBooks & Audio Books

15-Year-Old Jane Austen Writes a Satir­i­cal His­to­ry Of Eng­land: Read the Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script Online (1791)

This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neu­ro­science of Read­ing Great Lit­er­a­ture

Jane Austen Writes a Let­ter to Her Sis­ter While Hung Over: “I Believe I Drank Too Much Wine Last Night”

The Jane Austen Fic­tion Man­u­script Archive Is Online: Explore Hand­writ­ten Drafts of Per­sua­sion, The Wat­sons & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch a 1915 Film Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland Enhanced in 4K, with Costumes Based on Original Illustrations by Sir John Tenniel

Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land pre­dates the inven­tion of cin­e­ma by a cou­ple of decades. Nev­er­the­less, much like the “Drink me” bot­tle and “Eat me” pre­sent­ed to its young pro­tag­o­nist, Lewis Car­rol­l’s fan­tas­ti­cal tale has called out the same mes­sage to gen­er­a­tions of film­mak­ers around the world: “Adapt me.” This cen­tu­ry, though not even a quar­ter of the way over, has already brought us full-length Alice movies (to say noth­ing of tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tions) from Europe, South Amer­i­ca, and of course the Unit­ed States. Those last include sep­a­rate adap­ta­tions of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land and its sequel Alice Through the Look­ing Glass by no less an auteur than Tim Bur­ton.

Both of those books were also tak­en on by a writer-direc­tor named W. W. Young more than a cen­tu­ry ago, though he sim­ply com­bined por­tions of both nov­els into a sin­gle fea­ture. You can watch this silent Alice in Won­der­land from 1915 above, in a ver­sion its uploader calls “by far the high­est qual­i­ty ver­sion of this film on the inter­net,” assem­bled “pri­mar­i­ly from two prints scanned by the Library of Con­gress, along with a few oth­er sources.

Enhanced with “scene-by-scene image sta­bi­liza­tion,” it also excis­es “many title cards which were not part of the orig­i­nal film” added to sub­se­quent ver­sions, “and which slowed down the film con­sid­er­ably.”

Run­ning just under an hour, this recon­struc­tion includes scenes with such wide­ly known char­ac­ters as the Cater­pil­lar, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Tur­tle and the Queen of Hearts. Young’s footage of such fig­ures as Twee­dledee and Twee­dle­dum and Hump­ty Dump­ty has, alas, been lost to time. Still, unusu­al­ly for a film adap­ta­tion, this ver­sion includes much of Car­rol­l’s par­o­d­ic poem “You Are Old, Father William” — more, even, than made it into Dis­ney’s beloved ani­mat­ed fea­ture of 1951. With its stiff cos­tumes (based on the orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions by Sir John Ten­niel) and Long Island back­drops, Alice in Won­der­land may not boast quite the same pro­duc­tion val­ue, but watch­ing it now, long after the silent era, one can’t help but feel trans­port­ed to anoth­er real­i­ty alto­geth­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First-Ever Film Ver­sion of Lewis Carroll’s Tale Alice in Won­der­land (1903)

The Orig­i­nal Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land Man­u­script, Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed By Lewis Car­roll (1864)

Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land Read by Sir John Giel­gud

When Aldous Hux­ley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Won­der­land

Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, Illus­trat­ed by Sal­vador Dalí in 1969, Final­ly Gets Reis­sued

Curi­ous Alice — The 1971 Anti-Drug Movie Based on Alice in Won­der­land That Made Drugs Look Like Fun

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Russian Animators Who Have Spent 40 Years Animating Gogol’s “The Overcoat”

“Steady Pushkin, mat­ter-of-fact Tol­stoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irra­tional insight which simul­ta­ne­ous­ly blurred the sen­tence and dis­closed a secret mean­ing worth the sud­den focal shift,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his Lec­tures on Russ­ian Lit­er­a­ture. “But with Gogol this shift­ing is the very basis of his art.” When, “as in the immor­tal ‘The Over­coat,’ he real­ly let him­self go and pot­tered on the brink of his pri­vate abyss, he became the great­est artist that Rus­sia has yet pro­duced.” Tough though that act is to fol­low, gen­er­a­tions of film­mak­ers around the world have attempt­ed to adapt for the screen that mas­ter­work of a short sto­ry about the out­er­wear-relat­ed strug­gles of an impov­er­ished bureau­crat.

One par­tic­u­lar pair of Russ­ian film­mak­ers has actu­al­ly spent a gen­er­a­tion or two mak­ing their own ver­sion of “The Over­coat”: the mar­ried cou­ple Yuri Norstein and Franch­es­ka Yarbuso­va, who began the project back in 1981.

Their nine­teen-sev­en­ties short films Hedge­hog in the Fog and Tale of Tales had already received inter­na­tion­al acclaim from both fans and fel­low cre­ators of ani­ma­tion (their cham­pi­ons include no less an auteur than Hayao Miyaza­ki), with dis­tinc­tive­ly cap­ti­vat­ing effects achieved through a dis­tinc­tive­ly painstak­ing process. Whol­ly ana­log, it has grown only more labor-inten­sive as dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy has advanced so rapid­ly over the past few decades — decades that have also brought about great social, polit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ic changes in their home­land.

The Atroc­i­ty Guide video above offers a glimpse into Norstein and Yarbuso­va’s lives and work on the “The Over­coat” — to the extent that the two can even be sep­a­rat­ed at this point. Once, they were vic­tims of Sovi­et cen­sor­ship and sus­pi­cion, giv­en the ambigu­ous morals of their visu­al­ly lav­ish pro­duc­tions. Now, in their eight­ies and with this 65-minute-film nowhere near com­ple­tion (but five min­utes of which you can see in the video above), the prob­lem seems to have more to do with their own artis­ti­cal­ly com­mend­able but whol­ly imprac­ti­cal cre­ative ethos. They work to “sadis­ti­cal­ly high” stan­dards on a film that, as Norstein believes, “should be con­stant­ly chang­ing” — while also prop­er­ly express­ing the Gogo­lian themes of strug­gle, pri­va­tion, and futil­i­ty that can “only be cre­at­ed amid feel­ings of dis­com­fort and uncer­tain­ty” — hence their insis­tence on stay­ing in Rus­sia.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Niko­lai Gogol’s Clas­sic Sto­ry, “The Nose,” Ani­mat­ed With the Aston­ish­ing Pin­screen Tech­nique (1963)

Three Ani­mat­ed Shorts by the Ground­break­ing Russ­ian Ani­ma­tor Fyo­dor Khitruk

Watch The Amaz­ing 1912 Ani­ma­tion of Stop-Motion Pio­neer Ladis­las Stare­vich, Star­ring Dead Bugs

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

A Sovi­et Ani­ma­tion of Stephen King’s Short Sto­ry “Bat­tle­ground” (1986)

Enjoy 15+ Hours of the Weird and Won­der­ful World of Post Sovi­et Russ­ian Ani­ma­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: The First Sci-Fi Novel Written By a Woman (1666)

For a vari­ety of rea­sons, sci­ence fic­tion has long been regard­ed as a most­ly male-ori­ent­ed realm of lit­er­a­ture. This is evi­denced, in part, by the eager­ness to cel­e­brate par­tic­u­lar works of sci-fi writ­ten by women, like Ursu­la K. LeGuin’s Earth­sea saga, Octavia But­ler’s Para­ble nov­els, Joan­na Russ’ The Female Man, or Mar­garet Attwood’s The Hand­maid­’s Tale (uneasi­ly though it fits with­in the bound­aries of the genre). But those who pre­fer the ear­ly stuff can go all the way back to the mid-sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, where they’ll find Mar­garet Cavendish’s The Blaz­ing World, read­able and down­load­able in all its strange glo­ry free online.

The Blaz­ing World was first pub­lished in 1666 and is often con­sid­ered a fore­run­ner to both sci­ence fic­tion and the utopi­an nov­el gen­res,” writes book blog­ger Eric Karl Ander­son. “It’s a total­ly bonkers sto­ry of a woman who is stolen away to the North Pole only to find her­self in a strange bejew­eled king­dom of which she becomes the supreme Empress. Here she con­sults with many dif­fer­ent animal/insect peo­ple about philo­soph­i­cal, reli­gious and sci­en­tif­ic ideas. The sec­ond half of the book pulls off a meta-fic­tion­al trick where Cavendish (as the Duchess of New­cas­tle) enters the sto­ry her­self to become the Empress’ scribe and close com­pan­ion.”

In the video just below, Youtu­ber Great Books Prof frames this as not just a work of pro­to-sci­ence fic­tion, but also a pio­neer­ing use of the “mul­ti­verse” con­cept that has under­gird­ed any num­ber of twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry block­busters.

The Blaz­ing World con­tin­ues to inspire: actor-direc­tor Carl­son Young put out a loose cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion just a few years ago. Cavendish her­self described the book as a “her­maph­ro­dit­ic text,” pos­si­bly in ref­er­ence to its engage­ment with top­ics then addressed almost exclu­sive­ly by men. But it also occu­pied two cat­e­gories at once in that she orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished it as a fic­tion­al sec­tion of her book Obser­va­tions upon Exper­i­men­tal Phi­los­o­phy, one of six philo­soph­i­cal vol­umes she wrote. In fact, her work qual­i­fied her as not just philoso­pher and nov­el­ist, but also sci­en­tist, poet, play­wright, and even biog­ra­ph­er. That last she accom­plished by writ­ing The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puis­sant Prince William Cavendish, who hap­pened to be her hus­band. Let her life be a les­son to those young girls who simul­ta­ne­ous­ly dream of becom­ing a princess and a writer whose books are read for cen­turies: some­times, you can have it all.

Relat­ed con­tent:

100 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Women Writ­ers (Read 20 for Free Online)

The First Work of Sci­ence Fic­tion: Read Lucian’s 2nd-Cen­tu­ry Space Trav­el­ogue A True Sto­ry

When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Sci­ence Fic­tion, The Dream (1609)

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Every Pos­si­ble Kind of Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ry: An Exhaus­tive List Cre­at­ed by Pio­neer­ing 1920s Sci­Fi Writer Clare Winger Har­ris (1931)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Great Gatsby Explained: How F. Scott Fitzgerald Indicted & Endorsed the American Dream (1925)

When The Great Gats­by was first pub­lished, it flopped; near­ly a cen­tu­ry lat­er, its place at the pin­na­cle of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture is almost uni­ver­sal­ly agreed upon. Of the objec­tors, many no doubt remem­ber too vivid­ly hav­ing to answer essay ques­tions about the mean­ing of the green light on the Buchanans’ dock. Per­haps “the most debat­ed sym­bol in the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture,” it tends to be inter­pret­ed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly as “Gats­by’s love for Daisy, mon­ey, and the Amer­i­can dream,” as James Payne puts it in his new Great Books Explained video above. Exam­ined more close­ly, “what it may sug­gest is that the Amer­i­can dream’s most un-dis­cussed qual­i­ty is its inac­ces­si­bil­i­ty.”

“Fitzger­ald felt that the Amer­i­can dream has lost its way,” Payne says. “Base­ball, Amer­i­ca’s pas­time and the purest of games, had been cor­rupt­ed by the Black Sox game fix­ing of 1919, a real-life scan­dal men­tioned in The Great Gats­by. Fitzger­ald used it as an alle­go­ry of Amer­i­ca: if base­ball is cor­rupt, then we are real­ly in trou­ble.”

Hence Gats­by’s ulti­mate dis­cov­ery that Daisy, the woman for whom he had whol­ly rein­vent­ed him­self (in that quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Amer­i­can way), falls so far short of what he’d imag­ined; hence how Gats­by’s own “clas­sic rags-to-rich­es sto­ry” is “com­pli­cat­ed by the fact that he made his mon­ey in boot­leg­ging.” In the end, “the Amer­i­can dream only belongs to estab­lish­ment fig­ures,” those “who were born into it. Every­one’s class is fixed, just like the World Series.”

Though not well-received in its day, The Great Gats­by offered a pre­mo­ni­tion of dis­as­ter ahead that sub­se­quent­ly came true in both the Amer­i­can econ­o­my and Fitzger­ald’s per­son­al life. But even in the book, “despite his fear that Amer­i­ca is lost, he still offers hope.” Hence the vivid qua­si-opti­mism of the clos­ing lines about how “Gats­by believed in the green light, the orgas­tic future that year by year recedes before us,” which frames Amer­i­cans as “boats against the cur­rent, borne back cease­less­ly into the past” — a pas­sage whose inter­pre­ta­tion teach­ers are always liable to demand. If you hap­pen to be a stu­dent your­self, sav­ing Payne’s video in hopes of a quick and easy A on your Eng­lish lit exam, know that there are few more time-hon­ored tech­niques in pur­suit of the Amer­i­can dream than look­ing for short­cuts.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free: The Great Gats­by & Oth­er Major Works by F. Scott Fitzger­ald

T. S. Eliot, Edith Whar­ton & Gertrude Stein Tell F. Scott Fitzger­ald That Gats­by is Great, While Crit­ics Called It a Dud (1925)

The Great Gats­by Is Now in the Pub­lic Domain and There’s a New Graph­ic Nov­el

83 Years of Great Gats­by Book Cov­er Designs: A Pho­to Gallery

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Trans­lates The Great Gats­by, the Nov­el That Influ­enced Him Most

The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gats­by, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Clas­sic Crit­i­cism of Amer­i­ca (NSFW)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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