this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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I’ve been trying to find this ridiculous sci-fi story I read in elementary school. I thought it was Ray Bradbury but then I recalled it was, I believe, from a collection edited by and/or with a foreword by Bradbury.
The scenario was that people in the future had become so dependent on mechanized transportation that their legs atrophied. Walking around normally was seen as very strange as everyone used these hovering personal transport devices. I think the story basically just described the protagonist walking around town and taking strolls at night and how odd everyone else thought it was.
The Pedestrian
Archive.org's scan of it if you want to read it again.
Thanks! I feel like I might have conflated two stories though. The Pedestrian is definitely the one in the second half of what I described. I’m not sure about the first part of what I recounted though, it could have been a different story. I’ll have to read it and check it out.
Yeah, reading it, I definitely mixed the two. The first one I was thinking of for sure had a lengthy very sci-fi set-and-setting exposition where it explained that people flew around in hovering vehicles and their legs had atrophied. I can't remember the plot or anything that happened in the story, though, only that, so I think I just imagined that it had the plot of this Bradbury story. I've been wondering about it for a long time... I read it over 40 years ago and it was in a collection of stories probably published in the 60s.