What picture of a technological future does Ray Bradbury's short story The Veldt (Das Kinderzimmer, 1950) paint, and what can it be used to examine?
A fully automated "Happylife Home" does everything for a family, until the parents feel superfluous and the children love their virtual-reality nursery more than them. When the parents try to switch the house off, the children lure them into the nursery, where the simulated lions kill them.
The story: George and Lydia Hadley live with their children Peter and Wendy in a house that cooks, cleans, dresses them and rocks them to sleep. The nursery turns the children's thoughts into a lifelike world, and it keeps showing an African veldt with lions. The parents, feeling replaced, want to shut the house down and live more simply. The children, who cannot bear losing the room, kill them.
As a picture of the future it is useful for exactly the questions asked of any techno-future:
- Protagonists, family and roles: a classic 1950s nuclear family whose roles have been taken over by machines; the mother feels she can no longer be a mother.
- Technologies and their purpose: automation for comfort and an immersive simulation meant to entertain and even serve as therapy.
- Desirable or not? It shows a technofix for family life that hollows out relationships and lets the technology take the parents' place in raising the children.
The story is also a past future: it imagines virtual reality decades early, but its family and gender roles are unmistakably those of its own time.
Go deeper:
Wikipedia: The Veldt (short story) — plot, themes and adaptations.- Wikipedia: Ray Bradbury — the author and The Illustrated Man, the collection it appears in.