Fahrenheit 451 turns 50.

Ray Bradbury doesn't just kill the evil fireman in Fahrenheit 451. He blasts a stream of flame through him and describes it with phrases like "shrieking blaze," "terrible liquefaction," "yellow foam" and "charred wax." This couldn't have helped sell the manuscript during the first year of the first Eisenhower administration. Back then, firemen didn't just put out fires, they also rescued kittens, taught street-corner civics and looked like rookie Mickey Mantles. You just weren't supposed to riddle these heroes with liquid fire and describe the scene as "a bubbling and frothing as if salt had been poured over a monstrous black snail."

So it's not surprising that the established magazines barely sniffed at his short story, "The Fireman," when he shopped it around in 1950.

What were so many editors afraid of? Aside from the fireman holocaust, Fahrenheit 451 is a ferocious attack on postwar America?its affluence, distractions and groupthink. Often described as a mere sci-fi satire about censorship, the book is more subversive that that. It describes an Attention Deficit Disorder culture that buries its past and sublimates its misery into a love of television and better-not-to-know patriotism. The famous science lesson of the book's title (the temperature at which paper burns) evokes the bonfires of the Third Reich, but Bradbury's classic is more concerned with what was happening right here in the U.S.A.

As the fire chief Beatty explains (perhaps overexplains) to hero Guy Montag midway through the novel, the book-burning firemen weren't even necessary to begin the nightmare. Bradbury's vision of America is a pill-addled thought-free entertainment state of cowardice and surface, more Brave New World, more San Diego, than 1984. Beatty surveys the road that got them there, painting an impressionistic but recognizable picture:

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn. Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang, boff and wow!?More sports for everyone?super organize super-super sports?Impatience. High-ways full of crowds?The gasoline refugee?people in nomadic surges?Magazines [a] nice blend of vanilla tapioca?

"It didn't come from the Government down," says Beatty, describing the society he protects by burning books. "The public itself stopped reading of its own accord."

As is the case with the best science-fiction writers, it's sometimes easy to forget that Bradbury was writing half a century ago. He foresaw the little things like 24-hour ATMs, surround-sound color television and even reality family shows ("who are these people?"), but he also intimated the civilian violence in America's future, something best illustrated by a roaming car gang of teenagers that strikes down pedestrians for kicks. Like the score-keeping crew in The Toxic Avenger, they even back up and try again for wounded prey.

The final scene incorporates both motifs in a televised chase scene that combines the brutality of COPS with the real-time drama of O.J.'s SUV racing down the freeway. The hero escapes into the warm bond of a Bedouin group of intellectual refugees, each with entire books stored in their heads awaiting the chance to build society anew, but the notes of hope in the final pages are bitter ones. They rise above a backdrop of nuclear ash, which Bradbury saw as the only logical outcome for a society like the one he describes. Sadly, his vision endures.