First Contact: Or, It's Later Than You Think by Evan Mandery

Author:Evan Mandery
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Humorous, Presidents, Fiction, Human-alien encounters, General
ISBN: 9780061966187
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-02-01T08:00:00+00:00

ON RIGEL-RIGEL, CENSORSHIP IS almost unheard of. This is part of the reason for the Professor’s reaction. On Earth, however, it is as much a part of life as the Labor Day parade or the Iditarod. Attempts at banning books can be traced as far back as the third century B.C., when Qin Shi Huang, first ruler of the Qin dynasty, burned all copies of the Analects of Confucius, and ordered that followers of Confucius be buried alive. Confucius’s philosophy emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice, and sincerity.

Religious tracts have been a common target for censorship. The Spanish suppressed the Koran in the sixteenth century. The Catholic Church spent much of the Middle Ages attempting to suppress the Talmud. Pope Innocent XI ordered King Louis XIV of France to burn all copies. In 1536, William Tyndale was burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English. Tyndale believed, heretically, that the word of God should be known even to common people.

Some targets seem obvious. Darwin’s The Origin of Species was banned in Tennessee, which, for half of the twentieth century, prohibited teaching evolution. Others seem counterintuitive. Children’s books, for example, have met surprising resistance. Laytonville, California, banned Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax because it criminalized the foresting industry. A Colorado librarian removed Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory from the shelves because she believed it espoused a poor philosophy of life. The Alabama State Textbook Committee rejected Anne Frank’s diary because, they said, it was a “real downer.”

But no genre has met greater disapprobation than science fiction novels, which rival religious tracts in the frequency with which they have been the object of censorship. Past targets include:

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five by Owensboro High School in Kentucky because of the sentence: “The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the fly of the God Almighty.”

Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, by a Florida elementary school, for grouping Jesus with scientists and philosophers who defend Earth against evil.

C. S. Lewis’s Christian allegory, The Chronicles of Narnia, by the Howard County, Maryland, school system, because it failed to adhere to “good Christian values.”

Orwell’s 1984 for being pro-communist.

Huxley’s Brave New World for focusing on “negative activity.”

And, finally, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a book about censorship.

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