alt Hacker NewsThere Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
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I read this story in 4th grade. It felt like the future. Now, it feels like most of the technology is within reach - at least, it could be built. The automated stove being the main exception.
But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.
Okay, a stretch for HN, but: singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada named an album released last year Vendrán Suaves Lluvias (meaning There Will Come Soft Rains). She talked about how she and her brother read The Martian Chronicles as kids and she remembered the Sara Teasdale poem quoted at the end. She said she composed the songs at a difficult time in her life and, I guess, something about that image in the story (and the poem in it) resonated then.
For anyone curious, there's a Tiny Desk Concert of songs from the album at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9PoZ0Vcb_s and an interview, in English, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcQbB7Dc83U
Born in 1968 I missed “duck and cover” but rode the wave of Reagan brinkmanship with my skater friends until 1990, watching all the broadcast TV PSAs and songs and art about nuclear war. It was real. It pervaded daily life: the notion that two old white men were having a pissing contest with every human as disposable bargaining chips. And as always, 25% of the US population cheered for purification of the planet because Jesus was coming (see: Hal Lindsay).
USSR animated version (1984): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0
The most striking incongruity with our modern era to me is that the family was all outside when the blast occurred. With pervasive screens, we just don't get outside like we used to.
And why on earth was that dad mowing when the house was able to take care of it?
I think an appreciable number of people upvoting this and reading it or re-reading it may not have noticed why it was submitted today (the date on which the story takes place is tomorrow!).
One thing which I find striking here is that a modern home and attendant conveniences roughly embodies 10--15 horsepower of effort, or the work of 40 or so full time house staff.
Thus far, the only notable robots are little disks which vacuum up floors (and they're getting outlawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104371 ) and some innovations just haven't become widespread (an uncle of mine piped his home for a central vacuum system, compleat w/ a switch at each connection for on/off) --- I really can't recall a device with widespread demand since DVD and then Blueray players (or maybe the Wii? the PS2 counts as a DVD player arguably). I don't know anyone who has done more than read about "Smart Mirrors" for example....
What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand/distributed?
A rendition of this was aired on X-Minus One
https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles/XMinusO...
Though it makes me mourn for life lost when I read it even now, I never cared much for “There Will Come Soft Rains”. It’s a story exploring how what we make could continue on without us (for a time). But “The Pedestrian” (1951) is included at the end. It’s the last two pages out of that six page PDF. I think that one’s more apt to modern life. I read that one ages ago and it unsettled me.
Eternal rains will come
We should say goodbye
And suffer on our own
As all our thoughts were wrongI feel like the modern version of this would have the neighbourhood largely intact, but humans killed via miniature drones.
Drives home the point how few anticipated that batteries would advance so much.
The most interesting thing about science fiction to me isn't the things the authors get right, but what they get wrong. Like, the whole house talking in a ChatGPT voice, intelligent appliances, etc: brilliant prescience. But he still thought we'd be having linoleum on our floors...
reminded me of this joke
Tech enthusiasts: "Everything in my house is wired to the internet of things. I control it from my smartphone. My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I give it voice commands via Alexa, I love the future!"
vs
Programmers/Engineers: "I work in IT so my house has mechanical locks, mechanical windows, routers using OpenWRT, no smart home crap, no Alexa/Google assistants, no internet connected thermostats etc".
One of my favorite versions is read by Nimoy. https://web.archive.org/web/20200615075956/https://www.youtu...
Dimension X, 1950: https://ia800901.us.archive.org/33/items/OTRR_Dimension_X_Si...
Burgess Meredith Reads Ray Bradbury, 1962: https://dn720300.ca.archive.org/0/items/meredith-bradbury/01...
Edit: Ray Bradbury read by Leonard Nimoy, 1975 https://archive.org/download/bradbury-nimoy/1-There%20Will%2...
This story was adapted into a short animated film in 1987:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc
(Russian, with subtitles.)
I accidentally started a reread of Octiva Butler's Parable of the Sower in late 2024 (I'd read it many years ago, but forgot the timeline). It was eerie...
Singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada named an album released last year Vendrán Suaves Lluvias (meaning There Will Come Soft Rains). She talked about how she and her brother read The Martian Chronicles as kids and she remembered the Sara Teasdale poem quoted at the end. She said she composed the songs at a difficult time in her life and, I guess, something about that image in the story (and the poem in it) resonated then.
For anyone curious, there's a Tiny Desk Concert of songs from the album at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9PoZ0Vcb_s and an interview, in English, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcQbB7Dc83U
(Shared this on another post of the story last night, figured I might as well here, too.)
Ray Bradbury is the best horror writer to have worked in a sci-fi milieu.
This story is one of only a couple sci-fi short stories to creep me out enough that I still remember them vividly decades later. (John Varley's "PRESS ENTER ■" is another.)
For most of my life it's felt like we've been moving away from this scenario, but lately it's felt like we're sliding back towards it
Well. This is the day. It looks like this poster from the Vietnam War era may have come to pass. [0]
[0]https://www.etsy.com/listing/1266371519/vintage-original-197...
Lucky for us.
this version seems to be missing large sections compared to the other posted version, like how the mice throughly clean up the debris after the dog's entrance, the dog smelling food through the kitchen door and scratching at it, etc etc
I imagined one of those automatic lawn mowers on a very sunny day, going about its own business cutting the grass. Until it arrived on the non-shielded side, and it kinda sags a bit and keels over into the black-charred ground on that side. A clean shadow between the un-touched grass, and the ground in directly in the path of the blast. Or maybe the charred ground is for later. We need to see the nice, automated kitchen first. And only then the rest of the world. Would be a very interesting short film, I think.
I thought this might have been the one about the lush (but dangerous!) Venusian rainforest!
(In Bradbury's time, we knew Venus was covered in thick clouds, and could only speculate about what might be beneath the clouds. Clouds = rain = lush vegetation?)
Today is August 4, 2026
That dog scene wrecked me. Last living thing in the house, and the system just cleans it up like it’s another mess. No mourning, no pause. Just efficiency.
I wonder if the latest Jurassic Park: Rebirth film drew from this?
There is a reference to global warming that is similar to the poem. That the world will heat up, and humanity will die, and the earth will continue on as it has for a million years. The film mentioned the “the earth will shake us off, like a summer cold”.
This seems fairly comparable to the soft rains poem in this piece.
I read Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky recently and I think it takes more-or-less takes direct inspiration from this story (and the poem) with modern aesthetics. I liked it, it’s more dark-humorous than strictly bleak, but still pretty bleak as you read between the lines.
The story of a smart home that can't tell when you're not home! :-)
It's interesting to look at the short a story and see where we are still behind on home automation. We still don't have robot firefighting or accurate robot cooking, for example.
The planets were meeting, and each one complained about something. Then Earth said: "I’ve got humans." The others said: "Don’t worry, that’s not permanent."
Though to be fair the very first version was set in 1985, then shortly afterwards 2026, and revised again to 2057.
It impressive how prescient the technology feels. I mean in 2020 I would have thought the fully automated kitchen and the voice that asks which poem one wants to hear as fanciful, now it's kinda tech demo level.
Can't wait for all the inductive backdoors that will appear today thanks to this, LOL!
I liked Ray Bradbury's thoughts on the internet when it first came into existence
"Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn."
Bradbury describes the fully automated smart home, but its technology does obviously not extend into the garden exterior. Funny - that in reality robot vacuum cleaners and robot mowers were actually among the first gadgets in automated smart homes.
I perceive this as a flaw in the story. The author had a very prophetic vision of technology in the future, and with the silhouettes on the wall he produced a strong emotional image, but he didn't realize the contradiction.
Except, of course, if he envisioned manual lawn mowing as a future leisure activity!
Growing up, I hated this guy. Boring! Now, I can recognize writing talent.
Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said,
over and over, “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is …”
Reminiscent of his other short stories from the Martian Chronicles, also rife with apocalyptic themes
First time I have seen a parental rating in a blog post.
"There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone."
- Sara Teasdale, 1918
Didn't see the inspiration for Bradbury mentioned here. I love this poem. There's also a great song-rendition of it by The Three D's, a folk group popular in the 50's.
My all time favourite writer. No sci-fi writer could describe the launch of a rocket any more poetic than Ray Bradbury.
I'm glad our homes aren't shrieking at us at all hours.
Amazing story, though.
So...we're doing better than expected!
It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction.
In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon."
In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must come from gods’ magic.
This short story was particularly meaningful for me when I read it in school. I lived the same distance from New York City as the protagonist. And this was during the last days of the Soviet Union, which had placed my small hometown on its top 10 places to bomb list.
In Walter M. Miller Jr.'s book A Canticle for Liebowitz, we’re back in society that's recreating itself, with the Catholic Church acting as a centralizing force again, as after the fall of Rome and European plagues. Monks discover, collect, copy, and maintain shreds of texts.
Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.