BY JOELLEN COLLINS
Looking again at the great Ray Bradbury story, “The Veldt,” I was astonished how so much of his and other science fiction writers’ predictions have come to fruition, even if altered in some ways. The story deals with the Hadleys, a family living in a fully automated house where kitchen, housecleaning and even personal needs are filled by a system which provides them everything. They have two spoiled and entitled children, Wendy and Peter, who spend most of their time in a media room called the nursery where surrounding 3D technology portrays whatever they wish to experience. It is virtual reality to the tenth power. When their parents decide to close down the nursery and the house, the children sneak into the nursery, call up an African veldt complete with lions and dust, heat and the scent of blood. Later they invite and then lock their parents in. The last recorded sounds are the roar of lions and the screams of Mom and Dad as they are devoured.
Years ago this seemed shocking, but when I watched a television news feature on the most advanced inventions for virtual reality, I realized that we live in a world even seers might find unbelievable. The feature shows a man wearing a headset standing on a solid surface. When the image changes to an empty square beneath his feet, he panics and jumps ahead, even though he knows the floor is still there.
“Science News” articles chronicle the information that as the technical capacity of generating virtual worlds from home computers will soon be widely available, there are concerns among researchers. They worry about this technology of special head-mounted displays which create the illusion of being immersed in virtual three-dimensional worlds. In fact, researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany have compiled “a list of ethical concerns and concrete recommendations for minimizing the risks.” There is special concern, according to “Science News,” for “the psychological states and self-images of users who are able to inhabit a virtual environment almost as if it is the real world.” The possible effects of advanced technology have always, of course, been debated. Even Bradbury wouldn’t travel by air.
Even though Bradbury’s tale amplifies these fears with the idea that inanimate objects could actually become alive, that proposition doesn’t seem as impossible as we would have thought when he first published “The Veldt” in a collection of 18 stories entitled “The Illustrated Man.”
I wonder what he would think of very recent news that polio viruses placed in brain cells can destroy some tumors; a report that a researcher is experimenting with “chimeras” (goats that are implanted with human embryos to “grow” organs for transplant); a proven affirmation that brain cells can regenerate, or a discovery that certain cells show a possible heredity component in the brains of schizophrenics, with a distinct possibility of prenatal genetic labeling of babies. These are miracles, indeed, some exciting and some with scary, ethical and moral ramifications.
I think that Bradbury would say, “I told you so!”