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Bradbury’s “The Veldt”

In class today, we’ll be talking about Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” and “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Here are the instructions.

Start in your group by talking about your responses to the stories that you published on Medium in advance of today’s class. Then, consider the following questions about “The Veldt.”

1. Ray Bradbury once said, “After all, a computer is a book and a long-playing record is a book — they just have different shapes. It doesn’t matter where you get your knowledge, as long as you get it.” What do you make of this? Do you agree? Disagree?
2. Toward the end of “The Veldt,” Bradbury writes, “The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.” What specifically are the “bodies” here? What peculiar words does Bradbury use here and throughout the story to describe machines?
3. Look at the original publication of Bradbury’s “The Veldt” in The Saturday Evening Post and talk about how its audience would have encountered the story in 1950. How is their encounter different from yours? What do you make of the ads that originally sat alongside the story (I’ve included one in this post).
4. Think about how we talk about machines. Perhaps, glance at some contemporary ads for machines on the web. What peculiarities do you notice? Differences to the ads from the 1950s? Similarities?

Now, as a group come up with one question about Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” — or a question that draws a connection between the two Bradbury stories. Have someone in the group add your question as a comment somewhere in this paragraph.