“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury is a science fiction short story with the main theme being the consequences of technological advancement. This theme is carried throughout the whole story and is told by third person point of view. George and Lydia Hadley are parents of…
The Veldt Essay Examples and Topics
by Ray Bradbury
Best topics on The Veldt
23 September 1950
Ray Bradbury
Short story
Science fiction
George, Lydia, Peter, and Wendy Hadley
Machines, people’s nature, immersive entertainment
The story got adapted into the Illustrated Man for the cinema. It has also been adapted for TV several times.
The Hadley family owns a smart house. Robots and machines do virtually all house tasks, and the family members are left to enjoy their time. The two children can create a virtual scene from their imagination in the nursery. They choose a realistic scene from the African veldt, and the parents can smell the lion’s latest victim’s blood when they enter the room. The parents are so worried that they call a psychologist. David McClean, the psychologist, advises them to become more self-sufficient, move to the country, and turn the house off. Peter and Wendy resist that idea, and they convince their parents to leave them in the nursery for the last time. They lock their parents there, sending them to become victims of the pride of lions into their imagined virtual reality.
In this short story, Ray Bradbury predicted many technology advancements that we enjoy today. Augmented reality and immersive video games are among them.
When people become too immersed into technology, they lose touch with their human nature.
- “I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?”
- “Too much of anything isn’t good for anyone.”
- “Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with toy guns.”
This is one of Bradbury’s most recognized and critically acclaimed short stories. It’s a wonderful representative of the science fiction genre. The fact that the author predicted some technology advancements makes the story more interesting today.
The prose may seem too simplistic to readers used to complex works.