I don't think you've really processed The Murderer.
Bradbury was predicting that we'd have smaller slices of attention available, that we would choose to hyper-stimulate ourselves 24/7 and not choose to protect our time for quiet contemplation. That every moment would be filled with either important work messages or advertisements.
Bradbury doesn't even predict a way that this causes secondary harm. He just says "hey, this is how the future will look and some people won't be wild about it."
He nails it. That's exactly what our world looks like now.
His protagonist isn't a fan, probably Bradbury isn't a fan, but the explicit message is that most people will be in favor. If they weren't then we wouldn't have this kind of world.
So, ok, we can all decide what we think about that. The protagonist decides to destroy his company's equipment. The psychiatrist moves back to a life of notifications and buzzing. Life goes on and society continues to work.
The story is morally neutral. It isn't a complaint; that's the beauty of it. Bradbury is one of the few authors who often tried to achieve that kind of neutrality.
> The story is morally neutral. It isn't a complaint; that's the beauty of it. Bradbury is one of the few authors who often tried to achieve that kind of neutrality.
Bradbury's writing is many things, but morally neutral it is not. Throughout almost all of his books is a morality that looks very skeptically at change, and a tendency to predict any trend into slippery slope. His prose and storytelling is fantastic and as a counterbalance to more optimistic authors of the time like Heinlein his works are great, but Bradbury writes from a very distinct viewpoint.
A much more neutral older SF author, IMO, is Le Guin. She does a great job of bringing up complex ideas and not picking sides.
Bradbury was predicting that we'd have smaller slices of attention available, that we would choose to hyper-stimulate ourselves 24/7 and not choose to protect our time for quiet contemplation. That every moment would be filled with either important work messages or advertisements.
Bradbury doesn't even predict a way that this causes secondary harm. He just says "hey, this is how the future will look and some people won't be wild about it."
He nails it. That's exactly what our world looks like now.
His protagonist isn't a fan, probably Bradbury isn't a fan, but the explicit message is that most people will be in favor. If they weren't then we wouldn't have this kind of world.
So, ok, we can all decide what we think about that. The protagonist decides to destroy his company's equipment. The psychiatrist moves back to a life of notifications and buzzing. Life goes on and society continues to work.
The story is morally neutral. It isn't a complaint; that's the beauty of it. Bradbury is one of the few authors who often tried to achieve that kind of neutrality.