There is immediate foreshadowing in the opening lines of Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt":
'George, I wish you'd look at the nursery.'
'What's wrong with it?'
'I don't know....I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it.'
With this last line of Lydia Hadley (whose name, interestingly, has the past tense of have as part of it), there is a sense of foreboding, not just for the parents, but also for the children since there is the suggestion that they are psychologically altered by this virtual reality of the African jungle. The impending danger is foreshadowed in, not only the charging lions, but more subtlely in the "green-yellow eyes" of these virtual animals, whose evil influence supercedes the parental one. For, the children now have become obsessed with their virtual world, rather than the real one: "They live for the nursery."
Written in 1972, Bradbury's story not only foreshadows the destruction of the family unit of the Hadleys, but it hints at the dangers of virtual reality that are a present threat to the detachment of people from friends and family in modern society.
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