Allegory of Any Place

Because nothing is too good for their children, a man and his wife have installed in their home a $30,000 Happy-life Electrodynamic Playroom. Through intricate projections, odor machines and so on, the room is capable of becoming any place on earth that the children want to visit, including every sort of hanging garden and bower of bliss in the bibliography of never-never lands. The children, deprived of human love by the machine substitute, elect a sterner environment. They turn the room into a dry and baking swatch of the African veldt. In the end, they lock their parents in there, where a pride of hungry lions tears the adults to pieces.

This is the story of The Veldt, a new short play by Ray Bradbury which, with two other Bradbury one-acters, has just opened in Los Angeles. As the world's best science fiction writer, author of The Martian Chronicles and Hollywood's It Came From Outer Space, Bradbury has come to think that the world has actually entered the machine-dominated sci-fi era and that the human soul is already deep in an electronic coma. Hence his plays, though they are set in the future, are actually hyperbolic allegories of the present.

New Shores. In the second play, for instance, a couple of pedestrians are stopped by a cop car which contains no cops, only whirring machines with tiny electric brains. In the third, Bradbury postulates one man who alone among the scattered survivors of a thermonuclear holocaust remembers the civilization that preceded it. But somehow he can remember only material minutiae -candy wrappers, imitation flowers, the dashboard of a Cadillac.

Ray Bradbury obviously is one of the world's most visionary reactionaries. His enmity to the automobile is so basic that, although he owns two, he never drives and does not even know how. He rides a bicycle and has yet to make his first flight in a jet. He got rid of his first electric typewriter because he couldn't stand all the hmmms and uh'uhs it was saying in reaction to his stories.

Out of Mushrooms. At 44, he makes more than $50,000 a year, but he lives conservatively in a modest house with his wife and four daughters. His father was a lineman for a power company in Waukegan, Ill., and his own education stopped at the high school level. He has never studied physics, chemistry, or any of the other primary disciplines of science fictioneering, but his imagination more than makes up. "Where do you get your ideas?" someone once asked him. Bradbury was eating a mushroom in a restaurant at the time. "Anywhere," was his answer. "There's a story in mushrooms." There was, too. He wrote it that afternoon-all about mushrooms that were actually visitors from another planet, using mycological disguise in order to get inside earthling bodies and take over the world. The story later was turned into a memorable half-hour of TV by Alfred Hitchcock.

Bradbury wrote the excellent script of John Huston's movie version of Moby Dick; and his novel Dandelion Wine was a firm, straightforward remembrance of a youth in Illinois. His science fiction, however, has drawn him into a world he never dreamed of entering. Ingmar Bergman corresponds with him. Fran?ois Truffaut is writing the scenario for the movie version of his novel Fahrenheit 451. Christopher Isherwood has compared Bradbury to Edgar Allan Poe. And Ilya Ehrenburg says that he is one of the five most popular American writers in the Soviet Union, along with Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Spillane.

His view of the future is not all depressive. When he lifts his eyes above earth-gashing highway departments and bovine people licking corporate salt, he sees the rockets of the space age that he dreamed of in Waukegan as a little boy. "This is mankind's chance to be immortal," he says. "We're going to travel into space and live forever. Our children's children shall live a million miles away. It took us one billion years to form a spinal cord, and now we're going to leave this shore and go off to another planet. It's like being there the day the first fish crawled out on land."

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