Far from traditional literary discussion, the questions posed may offer another way of reading the novel — as genre science fiction. After all, Bradbury's obsessions with the suppression of fantasy literature may express, at the psychological level, the wrestling with the validity of his own career as a fantasist. Fahrenheit 451 represents Bradbury's first published novel, written at a time when — according to Brian W. Aldiss (Schocken, 1974) — "science fiction was still a minority cult, little known to any but its devotees." In his brief authorial statement appended to the beginning of The October Country (Ballantine, 1955), an abridgement of his earlier collection Dark Carnival (1947), Bradbury feels compelled to tell his readers that "[This book] will present a side of my writing that is probably unfamiliar to them, and a type of story that I rarely have done since 1948." By 1955 (during a time when his earliest work was out-of-print), Bradbury was aware of his (perhaps undeserved) reputation as a science fiction writer and was attempting to present to his readership an aspect of his work with which they were unfamiliar. Unsurprisingly, his next published book after The October Country, Dandelion Wine (Doubleday, 1957), is not science fiction, but a tour de force of juvenalia — specifically, a celebration of adolescence and the life-affirming value of the imagination. With the exception of A Medicine for Melancholy (Doubleday, 1959), a collection of short stories dominated by science fiction selections, Bradbury has rarely returned to science fiction. (Collections such as R is for Rocket [1962] and S is for Space [1966] only recycle earlier stories.)
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