Mead, without wife or employment (he was a writer earlier in his life) or TV, wanders the streets at night and whispers to every house as he moved: “What’s up tonight on Channel 4, Channel 7, Channel 9?” (90). through the nightly perambulations of Leonard Mead. TV sales jumped from 7k sold in 1944 to 2 million in 1950 (and by the end of the decade 90% of homes contained a TV) ( source), Bradbury maps the contours of a dystopic 2131 A.D. Written in the earliest years of the personal television boom in the United States, “The Pedestrian” imagines a silent night city in which its denizens are transfixed by their screens. Yes, I’d seen (and enjoyed) the 1966 François Truffaut adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 in college but I’d never returned to the texts… Until today, he was firmly an author of my youth. Others read in distant pastures surrounded by the sounds of creeks and roving cows. Some were from cassette audiobooks with my family on long travels into the west. All were from my first years of reading SF. Beacons of cryptic violence and sadness that continue to guide my reading adventures. The oppressive Venusian rains in “All Summer in a Day” (1954) and the carcasses consumed by lions in “The Veldt” (1951) remain the most distinct. Scenes and fragments from Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The Martian Chronicles (1951), Dandelion Wine (1951), The Illustrated Man (1951), and I Sing the Body Electric! (1969) percolate through my memories like embers that refuse to flicker out. You can read “The Pedestrian” in the February 1952 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Chelsey Bonestall’s cover for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed.
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