Ray Bradbury's tone in "The Pedestrian" is cautionary and foreboding. He has taken the reader one hundred years into the future and shown a world in which the machines control the humans. The machines that do the controlling in "The Pedestrian" are the television sets in every home and the robot police car which patrols the residential neighborhoods mainly to make sure that everybody is safe inside.
Ray Bradbury is more of a fantasy writer than a science-fiction writer or a prophet. He does not seem to take his imaginary picture of the world of 2053 entirely seriously. Some sci-fi writers try to visualize the future with accuracy as well as credibility. But Bradbury never seems too concerned about predicting the actual truth. His pictures of the future seem zany and exaggerated. He has a special horror of technology, which is similar to that expressed by E. B. White in his humorous/serious/horror/sci-fi short story "The Door."
In Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 he has a fire department that sets fires rather than putting them out. In his story "The Veldt," he has a fantastic futuristic house in which the children's playroom harbors real lions and other wild animals, or anything else the children want to imagine. And this technologically fantastic home could be purchased for $30,000! With all its accessories such a home should cost around a hundred-million dollars today, if such a house could ever be built. Bradbury is whimsical. He doesn't care about facts but about coming up with unusual and striking original ideas. He should not be taken too seriously. But he can always be read for pleasure and amusement.
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