Today I’ve reviewed the twenty-first story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future. Ray Bradbury conjures a strange new world without television.

Previously: Frederik Pohl’s “The Wizards of Pung’s Corners” (October 1958).

Up Next: Two stories by Damon Knight

“Thing of Beauty” (September 1958) and “You’re Another” (June 1955).

3.5/5 (Good)

Ray Bradbury’s “Almost the End of the World” first appeared in The Reporter (December 26, 1957). It later appeared in his short story collection The Day It Rained Forever (1959). If you have an Internet Archive account, you can read it online here.

In multiple earlier reviews in this series, I’ve laid out television’s transformative and speedy infiltration of the American consciousness and daily activities over the course of the 1950s. Multiple Bradbury stories critique this new world. The lovely and crystalline “The Pedestrian” (1951) imagined a future night city in which its denizens are transfixed by their TV scenes. The city, observed by the solitary one-time writer Leonard Mead, is as silent as “a wintry, windless Arizona country” (90). “Almost the End of the World” (1957) ruminates on the effects on American society if a cosmic event severs the viewer from the succor of the screen.