The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the centre of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veld appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in colour, reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The walls were blank and two-dimensional. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. ‘But nothing’s too good for our children,’ George had said. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high, it had cost half as much as the rest of the house. They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, light went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity. Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. They walked down the hall of their sound-proofed, 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. ‘It’s just that the nursery is different now than it was.’ ‘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.
‘What would a psychologist want with a nursery?’ ‘I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it.’ ‘George, I wish you’d look at the nursery.’ I'd not thought I would like this book so much, and now I actually want to read even more books by Ray Bradbury. Nice to read it now, as some of the stories are set in like 1969 or 2005, it's funny what people thought might have become of us by then =)
Written in 1951, there is a fascination of atom bombs, biological warfare, space missions, the general destruction of live as we know it and (because this is Ray Bradbury) book burnings. Most of them were SF, though some of them tended to be more like Horror-SF (if something like that exists?). I'm not a particular fan of short stories, but some of these were really good. But as I'm trying to actually read my TBR, I came across the Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, most famous of course for his novel Fahrenheit 451.Īnd, I really was surprised at how much I liked this book! (I also like Fahrenheit 451, now I think of it), but this novel is more like a collection of short stories (the central story is fascinating, but very small, and from a given point, it doesn't even appear between the short stories any more).
I don't remember exactly why I bought this book, and I think it has been on my TBR for the last two years.
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