So reports the SyFy Portal: SciFi Channel Could Pull Plug On ‘Dresden Files’.

The basic story is that the network is late in making a decision and that their internal market analysis was not what they wanted it to be.

Still, I hope they pick it back up, as I found it to be quite entertaining.

Via LA Weekly: Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted

Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens and Tolstoy.

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

What?!? Ray Bradbury watched Fox News! Did the Pulitzer Committee know about this?

But, seriously…

In truth, I must confess that whenever I have read or seen an interview with Ray Bradbury he always comes off as something of a curmudgeon with a little bit of an anti-technology undercurrent. It is ironic that he staked out much of his own literary career writing for television.

And really, I don’t buy the notion that television, per se, leads people who would otherwise read to not do so. I suspect the vast majority of non-readers would be non-readers whether we had TV or not. I will allow, however, that I would read more if I didn’t have a TV, but I read quite a bit as it is.

Interestingly (in the context of this particular conversation) the last five books I had read have been from Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series which I discovered because of the television series (I have been meaning to review both the TV show and the books, but haven’t gotten around to it yet).

h/t: TAM (where Sean Hackbarth takes issue with Bradbury’s current views on the 451).