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THE VELDT (Ray Bradbury Collection) by Ray Bradbury (hier online bestellen)
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The story:
The story of "The Veldt", is delving into the issue of how modern
technology can destroy the nuclear family. The story begins with the mother of the family, who has quite a
generic name. no information is provided of the characters' background and
how they came to the point in time they are now. The lines "Happylife
Home" and the familiar room settings like the parents' bedroom and the
nursery gives one a sense that this is a typical suburban home of the time.
The mother seems alarmed or confused about something, "the nursery
is...different now than it was", this at first might lead you to believe
the mother has true individual characteristics. However, when one reads on,
one sees the stereotyped reactions to every situation that comes about, the
parents then say "nothing's too good for our children".
Later in the story the parents discuss the problems of the incredible
house and nursery, "The house is wife, mother, and nursemaid, Can I compete
with it?", and the father has a generic answer "But I thought that's why we
bought this house". The parents in the story look upon their children's
needs as services instead of ways of expressing any love or care.
In the story we never learn anything about the children except for
their obsession with the nursery, "I don't want to do anything but look and
listen and smell; what else is there to do?". When the parents tell the
children the idea of shutting down the computerized house "for a vacation",
the children react in shock and stay with their one, single characteristic
given, they act shocked "Who will fry my eggs for me, or darn my socks?".
One then sees the children's primary relationship is to the house and not
the parents, the children exclaim "I wish you were dead!". And sure
enough, by the end of the story the children act on their characteristic own.
.
Extract from book:
"George, I wish you'd look at the nursery."
"What's wrong with it?"
"I don't know."
"Well, then."
"I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to
look at it."
"What would a psychologist want with a nursery?"
"You know very well what he'd want." His wife paused in the middle of
the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for
four.
"It's just that the nursery is different now than it was."
"All right, let's have a look."
They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which
had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed
and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them.
Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked
on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the
halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft
automaticity.
"Well," said George Hadley.
They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet
across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as
much as the rest of the house. "But nothing's too good for our children,"
George had said.
The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high
noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia
Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede
into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt
appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the
final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with
a hot yellow sun.
George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.
"Let's get out of this sun," he said. "This is a little too real. But I
don't see anything wrong."
"Wait a moment, you'll see," said his wife.
Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at
the two people in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of
lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty
smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And
now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery
rustling of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered
on George Hadley's upturned, sweating face.
"Filthy creatures," he heard his wife say.
"The vultures."
About the author:
Ray Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born
August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal
education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to
1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer
in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark
Carnival, in 1947.
His reputation as a writer of courage and vision was established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles
in 1950, which describes the first attempts of Earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, and the unintended
consequences. Next came The Illustrated Man and then, in 1953, Fahrenheit 451, which many consider to be
Bradbury's masterpiece, a scathing indictment of censorship set in a future world where the written word is
forbidden. In an attempt to salvage their history and culture, a group of rebels memorize entire works of
literature and philosophy as their books are burned by the totalitarian state. Other works include The October
Country, Dandelion Wine, A Medicine for Melancholy, Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Sing the Body Electric!,
Quicker Than the Eye, and Driving Blind. In all, Bradbury has published more than thirty books, close to 600
short stories, and numerous poems, essays, and plays. His short stories have appeared in more than 1,000 school
curriculum "recommended reading" anthologies. Mr. Bradbury's eagerly awaited new novel, From the Dust Returned,
will be published by William Morrow at Halloween 2001. Morrow will release One More For the Road, a new
collection Bradbury stories, at Christmas 2001.
Married since 1947, Mr. Bradbury and his wife Maggie live in Los Angeles with their four beloved cats. They
have four daughters and eight grandchildren. Sadly, Maggie passed away in November of 2003.
Buchdaten:
THE VELDT (Ray Bradbury Collection) by Ray Bradbury
Sprache: Englisch
Taschenbuch - 128 Seiten - Creative Education, Incorporated
Erscheinungsdatum: Februar 1993
ISBN: 0886821088
Preis: € ???
More works from the same author:
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