Tag: 1950

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury (The Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1950)1 opens with a concerned Lydia Hadley telling her husband George about what is happening in their house’s nursery, a holographic/sensory play area for their two children, Peter and Wendy. Lydia takes George to the nursery to show him and, once there, it switches on and they find themselves in the African veldt. At first they experience the sounds and smells of the simulation, and then:

“You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they’re on their way to the water hole. They’ve just been eating,” said Lydia. “I don’t know what.”
“Some animal.” George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light from his squinted eyes. “A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe.”
“Are you sure?” His wife sounded peculiarly tense.
“No, it’s a little late to be sure,” he said, amused. “Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what’s left.”
“Did you hear that scream?” she asked.

The lions move towards the couple and eventually charge, causing the pair to flee to the hall and slam the door behind them. They realise that they are running from a simulation but are badly frightened by the experience anyway. Subsequently, they tell their children to stop reading about Africa (the nursery works by reading “the telepathic emanations of the children’s minds and [creating] life to fill their every desire”), and the couple also decide to lock the nursery for a few days, even though it will cause tantrums.
The rest of the story unrolls from this episode, with George first finding he can’t change the scene in the nursery (but his daughter later does temporarily). Then, when a psychologist friend visits the room at George’s request, the lions and their unidentified prey are seen again. The friend’s blunt advice on seeing this is to shut the room down immediately and send the children to him for treatment.
George later shuts down the nursery and the rest of the automatic house devices, which causes the children to act out. However, when they plead for one final minute in the room, George relents, but (spoiler) when the couple go to retrieve the children George and Lydia are locked in the room and the lions kill them.
The story’s plot doesn’t work in a logical sense (how could a glorified video projector conjure up lions that could kill someone?),2 but I guess it works as a sort of surreal/TwilightZone-ish horror after the repeated telegraphing of the various cues (the lions and their unidentified kill, the screaming, the brattish and chilling behaviour of the children, etc.).
This is another of Bradbury’s anti-technology stories—the room is essentially a glorified TV, a device he railed against in other stories.
*** (Good). 4,650 words. Radio Drama link.

1. First published under the title The World the Children Made.

2. I didn’t like this as much the first time around but the ending is less jarring when you know what is coming.

Skirmish by Clifford D. Simak

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Skirmish by Clifford D. Simak (Amazing, December 1950) opens with a journalist called Joe Crane arriving early at his newsroom. After he realises that his alarm clock must have been an hour fast (this will prove significant later), he sees something move a nearby desk:

[. . .] a thing that glinted, rat-sized and shiny and with a certain undefinable manner about it that made him stop short in his tracks with a sense of gulping emptiness in his throat and belly.
The thing squatted beside the typewriter and stared across the room at him. There was no sign of eyes, no hint of face, and yet he knew it stared.

He throws a paste pot at it, and chases the thing into a cupboard which he locks but can’t open again. Then, when he rolls three sheets of paper into his typewriter, it types by itself, telling him, “Keep out of this, Joe, don’t mix into this. You might get hurt.”
Later on, after the rest of news team arrive, Crane is given a story to work up about a man who has seen a sewing machine rolling down the street, and which dodged him when he attempted to stop it. After Crane investigates this incident, and reads a news wire about a missing “electron brain”, he finds another message from his typewriter:

A sewing machine, having become aware of its true identity in its place in the universal scheme, asserted its independence this morning by trying to go for a walk along the streets of this supposedly free city.
A human tried to catch it, intent upon returning it as a piece of property to its ‘owner’, and when the machine eluded him the human called a newspaper office, by that calculated action setting the full force of the humans of this city upon the trail of the liberated machine, which had committed no crime or scarcely any indiscretion beyond exercising its prerogative as a free agent.

Crane takes the typewriter home with him, and he has a longer conversation with it which reveals that that the rat-like creature is one of an alien species that has arrived on Earth—and who are set on liberating all the machines here. There are further minor complications (someone opens the cupboard at work and the rat-machine escapes, the editor is annoyed at this “practical joke” and Crane’s failure to turn in his copy, etc.), but the story eventually ends with Crane in his house surrounded by the rat-machines. He realises everything that has happened is because he has been used as a test subject to gauge human reaction to the rat-machines’ plans—and that they are now going to kill him because he hasn’t responded in any significant way to this preliminary skirmish, may not be exhibiting typical human reactions, and now knows too much.
The final line has him facing off against the assembled rat-machines with a length of pipe in his hands.
This story is a pretty good example of an able writer being able to improve a thin SF idea by overlaying a complex plot above it (there is a lot of incident in this story, as well as the final refocusing at the end about how those incidents comprise a preliminary skirmish). However, we are never told how the machines are animated or made sentient (especially the ones without any power source) and there is little difference between this piece and supernatural fantasies like Stephen King’s Christine or Keith Roberts’ The Scarlet Lady1 (stories about killer cars that come to life). Still, if you can get past this lack of SFnal foundation in a piece that purports to be an SF story, it’s a decent read.
*** (Good). 7,250 words. Story link.2

1. Keith Roberts’ The Scarlet Lady for those in the mood for a killer car fantasy.

2. The original title for this story is terrible (Bathe Your Bearings in Blood!), and must have been chosen by Amazing’s editors (Howard Browne or William L. Hamling).