alt Hacker NewsThere Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
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I love Ray Bradbury. My favorite short story author.
More books and stories are listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_holocaust_fict... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apocalyptic_and_post-a...
The Beast of Heaven by Victor Kelleher is very relevant to current affairs. Two AIs guard a nuclear weapon in endless discussions, drawing heavily from Milton's Paradise Lost and the bible.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2333226.The_Beast_of_Hea..., borrowable at https://archive.org/details/beastofheaven0000kell/page/2/mod...
https://wnyc.org/story/bradbury-centennial-with-neil-gaiman
Yetide Badaki's marvelous reading begins at 3:50
The original download link's file having "...(1).pdf" in the name got me looking for a duplicate download for longer than I'd like to admit.
"water, gas and light bills"
I assume light bills refers to electricity, as, especially pre war, that's what electricity was predominantly used for?
Mandatory link: the Zarelli soundtrack, using Leonard Nimoy's reading.
https://open.spotify.com/track/0DflgiMYRQP3UXtZ47NBus?si=XGR...
Fun to witness all the things it got right, which we can now remark wasn't close at all. The dystopian robotic future exists somewhere in a Chinese factory if anywhere at all.
One of my favorites of Bradbury’s.
Haunting.
So, uh, how did this random site get the rights to republish Bradbury? Or, to judge by their front page, did they mistake Bradbury's works for public domain?
And nobody asinine enough to ask "where's my jetpack" because we'd need Von Neumann self replicating machines, a supply chain and significantly more robust coding to get there.
He might have done better to push it another 50 years. Problem being the other half of the MAD deal.
Not that the future isn't bleak, but I take heart we didn't all die in a massive thermonuclear war this timeline in the multiverse.
It's 2026. I'm still waiting for my martini to manifest. Thanks tech bros.
Earlier this year...
There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847297 - Feb 2026 (52 comments)
(I’ve turned off duplicate detection due to the significance of the date.)
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Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.