It is August 4, 2026. Everyone is gone.
In “There Will Come Soft Rains”, Ray Bradbury depicts a day in Allendale, California in 2026. A nuclear war has wiped out an entire population. The entire city is black, except for the silhouettes of people painted onto the walls. Despite the eerie emptiness, one house remains.
The house is straight out of a sci fi movie because it basically does the equivalent work of many workers. The house works relentlessly to take care of the family living there. But there is no one there anymore. The singing of the voice-clock now is a shrilling noise, echoing through the halls. The kitchen creates fresh and perfect food, and throws it away hours later. Tiny robot mice scurry to clean the floors, aimlessly running through unused grounds. The house works efficiently, but with no one to appreciate its efforts.
Bradbury personifies the house to an extent that should be more creepy than it is. He describes how the house fears that no one is listening to it, quivering at every sound in paranoia. Within the edifice is a deep yearning for attention. The fact that no one is there to receive these services makes the house seem pitiful instead of inviting.
The most unsettling part of the story is the lack of imagination needed to understand what Bradbury illustrates. He wrote the story in 1950 when the concept of technology doing everything for you was foreign. Now, not only is it unavoidable to use these services but we don’t even try to avoid it; we install Alexas and Google Homes for convenience. The concept of a house functioning automatically to fulfill your needs is not a far-fetched idea at all.
Fortunately, Bradbury didn’t predict everything correctly. The short story is a part of a collection of stories titled The Martian Chronicles. The novel takes us through the journey of some humans who flee a devastated Earth to Mars and begin to explore it. Throughout the chronicles, some travelers return to Earth. But then a nuclear war ensues, creating a divide in communication between the two planets. “There Will Come Soft Rains” is in the third and last set of the chronicles, dated from 2005 to 2026. This story is the second to last one, and it depicts the aftermath of a nuclear war on Earth.
We may not have people fleeing to Mars, but the short story still sends a message to the current state of humanity. As Robert Dominianni of the English Journal put it, “Bradbury is not primarily concerned with scientific attainment in the colonization of Mars. He is a social critic, and his work is pertinent to real problems on earth.” These “real problems on earth” have existed for hundreds of years. Over time, there has always been some change that people fear. Bradbury wants his audience to fear the extremes of technological autonomy.
At one point in the story, it is bedtime and the house reads a poem. It asks the mother what poem she would like, but receives no response. It chooses her favorite poem, fittingly named “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale. The poem is set in a time of war, and the main message is that nature will persist even if humanity perishes. Bradbury draws a clear parallel between the story and the poem. He warns his audience that nature will prevail over humans and every single one of their inventions: “Dawn showed faintly in the east… the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam.” Pat McLaughlin of Elon University ties it together well, explaining that “The sun has always risen in the east, so the specific mentioning of an otherwise common event was likely deliberate for symbolic reasons. The east represents a new beginning, and referring back to Teasdale’s poem we remember the central idea of “There Will Come Soft Rains” is that nature will eventually reclaim all things.”
It may seem easier to ignore Bradbury’s warning and claim that we could never be in a situation as extreme as the story. But a single look around would eliminate the validity of these claims. If we don’t take control of technology, it will take control of us. With recent gains in artificial intelligence, the world Bradbury predicted 70 years ago is close to reality.
But what happens to the house? Are we as doomed as Bradbury depicts us to be? A quick read of the five-page story will allow you to answer a few questions while thinking of hundreds more.
If you want to know what August 4, 2026, will look like, give “There Will Come Soft Rains” a read.
PS: There is an audio version of the short story that I enjoyed listening to; I’ve heard that the version by Meredith Burgess is exceptionally impressive, but I couldn’t figure out how to get an mp3 and was definitely not about to buy the vinyl version.
I really enjoyed your description of the short story, I remember reading it a few years and this was a good encouragement to go back and refresh my memory. I love how you didn’t distract from your analysis with too much summary. I think this piece is very pertinent to what is going on right now and I enjoy how your title humorously plays into that. Overall, I really enjoyed your connection to our installation of helpful technology into our own homes today. Makes you consider what Bradbury would say if he saw how popular Alexa is. I’ve always admired authors who can think and predict beyond their times and technology, I think it displays a certain understanding of humanity and it’s tendencies that is very important for an author who is writing social commentary. This is evident in Bradbury’s other pieces as well, and displays his deep understanding of human nature. Personally, I think too much technology can certainly be a bad thing. In french, we are discussing the invention of chips that could be surgically placed in a person’s body to connect with their phone and amplify their voice and personally, it terrifies me.
I will definitely be brushing up on my Bradbury after this. Thanks!
Thanks for your feedback! I definitely agree that too much technology can be bad, and the way that Bradbury describes technology certainly makes it seem more bad than good. But the short story makes you think about the state of our current technology, and it continues to shock me that this piece was written 70 years ago! That just goes to show how much our technology has developed, but also how much we’ve allowed it to run our lives.