14 ms·
There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
- kwelstr 2mo agoAmong 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 …”
- FuturisticLover 2mo agoFirst time I have seen a parental rating in a blog post.
- pmg101 2mo agoToday is August 4, 2026
- tomhow 2mo agoEarlier this year... There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847297 - Feb 2026 (52 comments) (I’ve turned off duplicate detection due to the significance of the date.)
- MengerSponge 2mo agohttps://wnyc.org/story/bradbury-centennial-with-neil-gaiman https://wnyc.org/story/bradbury-centennial-with-neil-gaiman Yetide Badaki's marvelous reading begins at 3:50
- dredmorbius 2mo agoOT: Selected Shorts is wonderful. My one complaint: it's rarely revealed when a story was published, and it took me far, far, far too long to realise that many of my favourites were many decades old. That said, hearing a story read and acted by a skilled player is its own joy. I'm a good reader, but I'm not that level of good, and a few decades of listening to Shorts has improved my own inner-reading voice. Available as a podcast, though the back-catalogue is parlous brief, largely due to copyright, I suspect. Still worth following.
- MengerSponge 2mo agoWith the right podcatcher* settings the back-catalogue issue goes away. It's still annoying when you want to share a particularly moving story with friends. *) Overcast user here: "Smart Speed has saved you 419 hours beyond speed adjustments alone"
- srean 2mo agoThanks for sharing this gem.
- pbronez 2mo agoYeesh how bleak
- flenserboy 2mo agoif you find this to be bleak, don't read his "The Small Assassin", or much of anything in The October Country.
- antonvs 2mo agoIt was published 5 years after World War II was ended via the first ever nuclear warfare. The silhouettes on the house wall are a clear allusion to the shadows of people left on buildings in Hiroshima. The bleakness was a warning and reminder of what was at stake at the time.
- tgv 2mo agoI wonder if the date was chosen at random. Hiroshima is august, 6, after all.
- wat10000 2mo agoIt's nothing particularly special in that regard, there's plenty of apocalyptic fiction that came out of the nuclear arms race. What's really bleak is that the story's depiction has been a real possibility for longer than most of us have been alive, and pretty much nobody cares to do anything about it. It's to the point where people talk about the threat of sudden nuclear annihilation as something relegated to the past, when it never went away.
- Aloha 2mo agoOne of my favorites of Bradbury’s. Haunting.
- andai 2mo agoThis story was adapted into a short animated film in 1987: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc (Russian, with subtitles.)
- r721 2mo agoBetter quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quyaaszg6jc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quyaaszg6jc
- Mikhail_Edoshin 2mo agoBradbury was very popular in USSR. His Wikipedia page has an anecdote of a Soviet filmmaker recognizing him in a crowd and surprising the rest of the celebrities around who had no idea who Bradbury was. (Another such author would be Vonnegut.) There was a Soviet publisher Kniga (Book) that published only books about other books: book art, technology, bibliophile stories and so on. One of their books was a collection of short stories whose main topic was books, reading, writing or similar. One of stories was Bradbury's "Forever and the Earth", translated, of course, but very well. I was a teenager then an I remember being deeply impressed by it. I knew Bradbury, of course, but mostly from sci-fi and he wasn't really a sci-fi author. (One of Soviet sci-fi writers pointed out that Bradbury was pretty much anti-scientific in his stance.) That story made Bradbury stand out for me.
- throwaway270925 2mo ago> 1987 correction: 1984
- HomeDeLaPot 2mo agoThe story of a smart home that can't tell when you're not home! :-)
- Finnucane 2mo agoBut it recognizes the dog. Priorities.
- purple-leafy 2mo agoRay Bradbury has some great ideas, but I hate his writing style. It’s far too flowery, he’s on a spectrum that contains Hemingway at one extreme, and Bradbury near the other. I prefer Hemingway. Writing style at least.
- squigz 2mo agoInterestingly, I had the exact opposite reaction - I enjoyed the writing itself, but didn't find the premise all that interesting.
- purple-leafy 2mo agoMy friend, we exist at opposite ends of a spectrum ha
- squigz 2mo agoHonestly I'm just tired of the doom and gloom. I should probably keep in mind this was written in 1950.
- purple-leafy 2mo agoTry some Arthur C Clarke, less doom and gloom
- Mikhail_Edoshin 2mo ago
- SamuelAdams 2mo agoI 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.
- myself248 2mo ago"shake us off" sounds more like George Carlin: > We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
- ethagnawl 2mo agoYou left out the best part: > The planet is fine, the people are fucked.
- layer8 2mo agoEarth overcoming the sickness that is homo sapiens is a long-standing meme. The ideas that species can become extinct (Cuvier) and that humans are hurting the planet (Humboldt) have existed since around 1800.
- myself248 2mo agoOh, this just popped into my head. If you want an early piece about global warming, I submit Metropolitan Nightmare: https://poets.org/poem/metropolitan-nightmare https://poets.org/poem/metropolitan-nightmare
- water-data-dude 2mo agoFor 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
- kibwen 2mo agoThe great sleight-of-hand of the 20th century is that it never went away, we all just collectively decided to stop thinking about the fact that at every given moment for the rest of human history we'll never be more than thirty minutes away from total nuclear annihilation.
- pfdietz 2mo agoThe world doesn't have enough nuclear weapons for "total nuclear annihilation".
- SkyeCA 2mo agoPerhaps not, but there's no functional difference to the millions (hundreds of millions even) of victims if you start hitting major population centres.
- wat10000 2mo agoThere's plenty enough to make the second-worst war in human history look like an enjoyable beach vacation by comparison.
- ben_w 2mo agoTo end all humans with the weapons directly? Indeed not. To break all logistics chains, ending most industrial output, reducing carrying capacity back to the pre-industrial age? That I think is still doable.
- jandrese 2mo agoThe fall of the USSR chopped the legs out from under these stories. Nobody is worried about Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan unleashing global thermonuclear war. That scare tactic just doesn't work. Even back in the 60s a lot of that paranoia was the result of internal propaganda.
- MrBuddyCasino 2mo agoMandatory link: the Zarelli soundtrack, using Leonard Nimoy's reading. https://open.spotify.com/track/0DflgiMYRQP3UXtZ47NBus?si=XGR9M8J-SGyKqwAdyqsHhw&utm_source=copy-link https://open.spotify.com/track/0DflgiMYRQP3UXtZ47NBus?si=XGR...
- cachius 2mo agoZarelli - Falling Light ft. Leonard Nimoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ekjpJWSvY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ekjpJWSvY
- philosopherNoob 2mo agoThough 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.
- kombookcha 2mo agoYou know what, you're right - The Pedestrian hit me much harder this time around than the first time I read it. God, I love Bradbury.
- brazzy 2mo agoWhat's the most unsettling to me is that the one thing that makes it less apt to modern life is the implication that at 8 PM, everyone is at home. Nobody still working or commuting.
- srean 2mo agoI relate strongly with The Pedestrian. I love going for long walks at odd hours. In the United State police's defence once I was walking all by myself at 3 in the morning in Mountain View, peeking and crouching among the bushes for good shots with my camera. A police car approached me. It ended up being a non-threatening conversation. It was early 2002. All in all quite surprising given my brown skin and then long beard. https://ibb.co/j9XFgjDS https://ibb.co/j9XFgjDS https://ibb.co/Y7VyGb1w https://ibb.co/Y7VyGb1w
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- inigyou 2mo agoI once sat on the side of a busy path - not a road! - remote controlling a silly Halloween decoration on the other side. Three times police officers checked I was okay. One person stole the battery out of it.
- schoen 2mo agoI 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!).
- ghaff 2mo agoI didn't get the link to the current date. But aside from the fact there was no Mars linkage probably my favorite Bradbury short.
- duskwuff 2mo ago> But aside from the fact there was no Mars linkage probably my favorite Bradbury short. This story happens to describe events on Earth, but it's part of the same chronology as the rest of the Martian Chronicles stories. The story The Million-Year Picnic describes the same war from the perspective of a family who escaped to Mars. As an aside, later editions of the book advanced all the dates by 31 years; those editions put this story in August 2057 instead.
- SwtCyber 2mo agoThe future arrived quietly
- larodi 2mo agoIt is now public domain ?
- briansm 2mo agoReminds me of when November 2019 came and went (the date that Blade Runner is set in)
- Brian_K_White 2mo agoSeveral years ago when a meme about Back to the Future was going around I made: https://gifyu.com/image/blAbD https://gifyu.com/image/blAbD
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- petethomas 2mo agoDimension X, 1950: https://ia800901.us.archive.org/33/items/OTRR_Dimension_X_Singles/Dimension_X_1950-06-17__11_ThereWillComeSoftRain-ZeroHour.mp3 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%20-%20There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains.mp3 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%20Come%20Soft%20Rains.mp3 https://archive.org/download/bradbury-nimoy/1-There%20Will%2...
- backpackviolet 2mo agoI 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.
- twotwotwo 2mo agoOkay, 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9PoZ0Vcb_s and an interview, in English, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcQbB7Dc83U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcQbB7Dc83U
- srean 2mo agoDoes Tiny Desk have the best sound engineers or what ?
- greyhelm 2mo agoTiny Desk, along with KEXP, are absolutely brilliant at what they do.
- srean 2mo agoAn emphatic yes. It's a strange coincidence that I wanted to name KEXP too in my previous comment. London Grammar @ KEXP ranks pretty high.
- officeplant 2mo agoThey constantly blow my mind, especially with the more recent Napalm Death tiny desk concert.
- bobson381 2mo agookay wow. I have seen a lot of quieter bands on those, absolutely insane that they captured this. Funny blend of genre and space.
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- doodlebugging 2mo agoWell. 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-1970s-antiwar-poster https://www.etsy.com/listing/1266371519/vintage-original-197... Lucky for us.
- ggm 2mo agoAnd 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.
- nephihaha 2mo agoA speedy thermonuclear demise would have been better than this mess. Emphasis on speedy.
- iririririr 2mo agoThe 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.
- AlphaGeekZulu 2mo ago"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!
- SwtCyber 2mo agoPeople still cook in houses with microwaves and wash dishes despite owning dishwashers
- ViscountPenguin 2mo agoCooking is pretty different to lawn mowing here, you still can't replicate the output of a cooked meal with any easily available combination of home appliances and robotics (let alone just microwaves). I think a large chunk of people would probably stop cooking if that was possible.
- doodlebugging 2mo agoYeah. All they needed back then was a healthy dose of some of those new chemical fertilizer/herbicides to broadcast onto their monoculture non-native grass lawns. They could look forward to the smell of fresh-cut grass while they enjoyed snorting the exhaust from their leaded gasoline lawnmowers and edgers. They could have the nicest, greenest lawn on the block and be the envy of all their neighbors. Later on, like their neighbors, they can stumble thru the last years of their lives with Parkinsons or other chemically-induced afflictions or just slowly waste away with internal cancers while their lead-addled offspring elect criminal pedophiles and imbeciles to lead the whole country - backwards. Man, I need to go to sleep. I do agree with your analysis though.
- deepsun 2mo agoWell I enjoy mowing my lawn (with a mechanic mower of course). Anything but the office chair and monitor.
- Terratrader 2mo agoMy all time favourite writer. No sci-fi writer could describe the launch of a rocket any more poetic than Ray Bradbury.
- SwtCyber 2mo agoBradbury wrote rockets the way other writers wrote sunsets
- cachius 2mo agoMore books and stories are listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_holocaust_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_holocaust_fict... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apocalyptic_and_post-apocalyptic_fiction 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_Heaven https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2333226.The_Beast_of_Hea..., borrowable at https://archive.org/details/beastofheaven0000kell/page/2/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/beastofheaven0000kell/page/2/mod...
- graysnow86 2mo agothis 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
- dfansteel 2mo agoThe original was published as a one page story. It was later reprinted in a longer format.
- laszlojamf 2mo agoThe 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...
- ZoomZoomZoom 2mo agoLots of places still use PVC covering commonly called linoleum. And laminate that I see everywhere is not so technologically remote, with its plastic surface.
- rubyfan 2mo agoIt would be dull to write about all the great new building materials our houses are made and the utter lack of futuristic convenience we actually have.
- tgv 2mo agoI'd hazard changes in taste are more random than technological progress.
- specialist 2mo agoLinoleum became the premium option, now named marmoleum. https://www.forbo.com/flooring/en-us/commercial-products/linoleum/marmoleum/pl69tq https://www.forbo.com/flooring/en-us/commercial-products/lin... If fossil carbon ever becomes (commercially) scarce, vinyl might end up the premium choice. I predict plank will always suck.
- MSFT_Edging 2mo agoI've actually considered premium linoleum for the give underfoot. LVP is such a terrible flooring. Sure it's cheap to buy and install, but man you feel that cheapness.
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- katzgrau 2mo agoNo nuclear apocalypse yet. Nice.
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- none2585 2mo agoThe day is young!
- darkwater 2mo agoIt happened the day before, since children were still playing. We are safe.
- excalibur 2mo agoMy impression was that it had happened several days to a few weeks prior. Enough time for the house through ordinary daily activity to largely exhaust its water reserves. Of course most of today's actual houses don't keep that much on hand, but it sounds like this one had a sizable store at one point.
- darkwater 2mo agoSure, I should have said "at least the day before"
- butlike 2mo agoMaybe it happened while we were sleeping and this is just some radioactive psychedelic dream
- WillAdams 2mo agoFor the fictional take on that see Ursula K. LeGuin's wonderful novel _The Lathe of Heaven_ --- the PBS movie version is unexpectedly quite good.
- tetris11 2mo agoEternal rains will come We should say goodbye And suffer on our own As all our thoughts were wrong
- marking-time 2mo agoThank you for that. I one of the reasons I liked the story was the embedded poetry. It adds a mindful stillness that creates a poignancy.
- ngvrnd 2mo agoSo is The Pedestrian...
- Jtsummers 2mo ago> So is The Pedestrian... It's set in November, not August, and another 27 years further in the future (at least the version currently linked to on the front page).
- CTDOCodebases 2mo agoI liked Ray Bradbury's thoughts on the internet when it first came into existence
- jhbadger 2mo agoHe also had interesting ideas on shopping malls of all things, hoping that they could turn into places where people would socialize besides shopping and that they should have a maze-like layout so that people could get what he called "enjoyably lost" the way people can exploring cities. The since-closed Horton Plaza mall in San Diego had an odd layout and the architect even claimed inspiration from Bradbury for it.
- CTDOCodebases 2mo agoI think the maze thing is a strategy that mall operators use to trap shoppers in them and encourage them to spend more.
- jhbadger 2mo agoI'm sure that's why mall owners like it but Bradbury was advocating it from the angle of discovering cool alleys with little shops and restaurants like you can in an old chaotic city like Rome.
- CTDOCodebases 2mo agoI think my particular experiences and shopping style have tainted my view. I understand what you are talking about because the first time entering these spaces always holds a sense of wonder and discovery. Just like exploring the backstreets of some medieval city but since I generally shop alone and with purpose I am always frustrated by the process of exiting.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoI spent years of my childhood in Horton Plaza, as well as Seaport Village, Mission Valley Center, and Fashion Valley. I would say that we never felt “trapped” by Horton’s layout. There were plenty of clearly-marked exits around the perimeter. But the maze features were remarkable and unique for us. There were bridge walkways with an incline of half a level. There were asymmetrical stairways. The perimeter of stores was not square. There were many levels and elevators. There were no particular “anchor stores” like the big department stores, although the multiplex theater was a focal point. Elements that kept us inside included food and the aroma of food. Just thinking back to 1989 in Horton, I can practically smell the warm pretzels, cinnamon rolls, and candy stores. There were benches and places to sit. There were sculptures and bold colors and the Jessop’s Clock. Santa Claus and his elves every Christmas. We were in the heart of downtown, but crime was unheard-of and mall rats did not bother us. It was a place to walk around and share family experiences. Perhaps we were the mall rats.
- nahuel0x 2mo agoUSSR animated version (1984): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0
- Tade0 2mo agoThis clip is what introduced me to this story. This adaptation is heavily modified, but I think it adds to the whole thing. Soviet artists had an uncanny talent for making everything that's unsettling even more so.
- butlike 2mo agoWhere'd the Turkey dinner come from if it's a nuclear wasteland? All joking aside; an excellent animation
- purpleflame1257 2mo agoBradbury actually anticipated this on the Martian side and explicitly calls out frozen dinners.
- jhbadger 2mo agoI think the idea is that the house had large amounts of storage and freezers that it could use to get ingredients for meals which it then cooked.
- fyltr 2mo agoThey just died that night in the video, being woken up destroys the remains.
- mbernstein 2mo agoNature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.
- nahuel0x 2mo agoAs far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.
- pfdietz 2mo agoOr perhaps the comment you were responding to was asserting "knowing" or "caring" is not something Nature can do.
- worksonmine 2mo ago"Humanity" is far from "all the life on Earth". Nature will be better off once it happens.
- blooalien 2mo ago> Nature will be better off once it happens. As long as "it" happens before we poison or otherwise harm our planet beyond some "tipping point" after which Earth becomes "inhospitable" to most/all "complex" life in general.
- taybin 2mo agoI love Ray Bradbury. My favorite short story author.
- jake_and_fatman 2mo agoGrowing up, I hated this guy. Boring! Now, I can recognize writing talent.
- Tade0 2mo agoI 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.
- Denote6737 2mo agoyou say that like trump wasn't stopped from launching nukes at iran by one of his military advisors.
- inigyou 2mo agoCome to think of it, why hasn't Israel launched any? We know they have them, Iran knows they have them, and they're not as restrained.
- marking-time 2mo agoThis is such an interesting point. Interesting as in terrifying.
- GlickWick 2mo agoMy guess has always been the delicate balance of perception. Nukes are (rightfully) perceived to be beyond the basic destruction we've come to expect of war. They're a tool for annihilation. If you use them offensively the rest of the world will become so afraid of you that they'll nuke you so you can't nuke them. Israel isn't strong enough to entertain the idea that they could survive this.
- WillAdams 2mo agoOne 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 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?
- intrasight 2mo agoIt'll be a US or Japanese or South Korean robot since it's not allowed to come from China. I'd be in favor of Apple entering that market. I think they'll be a huge first-mover advantage because of the Chinese blockade preventing cheap clones.
- schnitzelstoat 2mo agoRoomba made some of the first robotic vacuum cleaners and they were based in the US. Nowadays, they are just more expensive and inferior to the Roborock ones though. But thanks to the wonder of protectionism soon the customer won't be able to pick the better product.
- intrasight 2mo agoWhat's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society. Also I think a better policy than blocking Chinese imports (which is probably not sustainable anyway) would be to require that the software be audited and comply with regulations. Same rules and regulations should apply to robots from all countries.
- spmealin 2mo agoOne of my favorite versions is read by Nimoy. https://web.archive.org/web/20200615075956/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npk8Wi73r2c https://web.archive.org/web/20200615075956/https://www.youtu...
- blooalien 2mo agoThanks for this. I read the written version while listening to Nimoy's reading in the background. :)
- JshWright 2mo agoI 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...
- pepperoni_pizza 2mo agoThat is about the most prophetic scifi book I have read. Not in getting all the details right but in general vibe and direction.
- mrloopex 2mo agoBorn 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).
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- BowBun 2mo agoHis source and claims seem backed up - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Great_Planet_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Great_Planet_Earth
- purpleflame1257 2mo agoIt'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.
- inigyou 2mo agoFire sprinklers are robot firefighters.
- r3trohack3r 2mo agoA rendition of this was aired on X-Minus One https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles/XMinusOne56-12-05078ThereWillComeSoftRains-ZeroHour.mp3 https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles/XMinusO...
- phreeza 2mo agoFunny there the date is April 1985, a lot earlier and almost my birthday!
- diseasedyak 2mo agoI'm glad our homes aren't shrieking at us at all hours. Amazing story, though.
- bananamogul 2mo ago"I'm glad our homes aren't shrieking at us at all hours." We have phones to do that for us.
- callmeal 2mo agoI had to replace a fire alarm last week, so sometimes they do shriek at us at all hours!
- thrtythreeforty 2mo agoI 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.
- cautiouscat 2mo agoWe're closer to the stove, kind of. At least with things like Tovala. I've never actually met someone with one though.
- XorNot 2mo agoI really wish we could just get a thermal imager integration for a stove which could catch a pot of boiling water about to boil over and back off the heat automatically.
- cautiouscat 2mo agoBest we can do is Wifi to set your timer.
- mathgeek 2mo agoElectric kettles have done this for decades. The tech is also in sous vide machines.
- arm32 2mo agoCan't wait for all the inductive backdoors that will appear today thanks to this, LOL!
- hnlb53nrpg 2mo ago[dead]
- jrsdav 2mo ago"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.
- state_less 2mo agoNice imagery, but feels like a bit of a put down of humanity. Humans are also nature, let's not leave ourselves out. https://youtu.be/mTEUrdKehSg https://youtu.be/mTEUrdKehSg
- the_af 2mo agoIt is really an anti-war poem rather than anti-humanity or about nature in general. Sara Teasdale was forced to write her sentiments obliquely. From Wikipedia: > "The Sedition Act of 1918 enacted two months before the original publication of "There Will Come Soft Rains" made it a criminal offense to "willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States" and forced Teasdale to express her opposition to World War I "obliquely" in what might appear to be a pastoral poem." If you think about it, Bradbury's story is also anti-war.
- state_less 2mo agoIf you read the Influences section just under section you quoted from Wikipedia, it seems she was under the influence of the idea of an 'uncaring universe' from reading Darwin. And yet there are humans that treat animals well (e.g. dogs, cats, crows and so on... ) These animals would feel the loss if humans disappeared. So i don't think it's right to say that nature (animals) wouldn't care and that the sentiment is a bit of implied put down of animals capacity for emotion and caring. Animals can care about their own and across species. Humanity would do well to feel less disjoint and separate from other humans and animals. That alone would reduce conflict a great amount and highlight the good that can be done between humans and animals. As you probably noticed, I'm not fond of making a big distinction between humans and animals or nature. Hope that gives another perspective, and yeah, she probably was against the war and upset about the way humans were behaving at the time.
- armagon 2mo agoThe 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?
- srean 2mo agoTo smell fresh cut grass. It can be quite enjoyable.
- jasonmp85 2mo ago[dead]
- INTPenis 2mo agoTo be alone for an hour.
- jeanlucas 2mo agothis guy gets it
- deadbabe 2mo agoThe things we enjoy doing, we prefer to do ourselves. For example: coding.
- nullpoint420 2mo agoMan, if only I wasn't so burnt out. I've still been day-dreaming about architecture and design for my side-projects. I haven't had a chance to sit down and get into the flow state like I used to.
- mindslight 2mo agoI've got a neighbor who I'm pretty sure would still be out there.
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoFun 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.
- the__alchemist 2mo agoI 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?)
- hcs 2mo agoSame, seeing the title and having not read Bradbury for a long time I was thinking either The Veldt or that one (The Long Rain). I did remember it on reading, though, and it's an unsettling feeling.
- paulorlando 2mo agoIt 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.
- vidarh 2mo agoReading Philip K. Dick's short stories in publication order is also quite something in that respect. It was so pervasive in his early stories.
- schiffern 2mo ago>It seems quaint now, It goes up and down. Some days I wish it seemed more quaint.
- dbspin 2mo agoBeautifully articulated, but I have to disagree with you on nuclear power. We're close to the point where renewables and battery tech are a solution to all our power needs. Remaining obstacles being primarily political / geopolitical. Meanwhile, after 70 years we're still no closer to a safe long term solution for nuclear waste. Every new and untested nuclear reactor design falls into the same pro-innovation bias of failing to address it's own unintended consequences. Like the utterly wild and rarely estimated cost of decommissioning older plants.
- chairhairair 2mo agon/a
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- yk 2mo agoIt 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.
- MarkusQ 2mo agoSo...we're doing better than expected!
- neaden 2mo agoThough to be fair the very first version was set in 1985, then shortly afterwards 2026, and revised again to 2057.
- nc55g3g 2mo agoThat 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.
- Cheyana 2mo agoIt's 2026. I'm still waiting for my martini to manifest. Thanks tech bros.
- lucidrains 2mo agoReminiscent of his other short stories from the Martian Chronicles, also rife with apocalyptic themes
- abhishek03113 2mo agoreminded 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".
- inigyou 2mo agoYou forgot the punchline: "the smartest thing in my house is a printer, and I keep a gun next to it in case it makes a funny noise."
- abhishek03113 2mo agoyeah lol !
- stodor89 2mo agoI'd never trust a printer enough to leave a gun next to it. Especially if it's HP.
- pkasting 2mo agoRay 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.)
- twotwotwo 2mo agoSinger-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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9PoZ0Vcb_s and an interview, in English, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcQbB7Dc83U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcQbB7Dc83U (Shared this on another post of the story last night, figured I might as well here, too.)
- kebman 2mo agoI 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.
- crooked-v 2mo agoSo, 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?
- svobodamartin 2mo agoThe 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."
- benj111 2mo ago"water, gas and light bills" I assume light bills refers to electricity, as, especially pre war, that's what electricity was predominantly used for?
- r3trohack3r 2mo agoMy favorite rendition of this aired on X-Minus One https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles/XMinusOne56-12-05078ThereWillComeSoftRains-ZeroHour.mp3 https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles/XMinusO...
- Animats 2mo agoThe animated Russian version: [1] (1984) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0
- michaelhoney 2mo ago2026 seemed impossibly far away when I first read this c. 1980. How time flies
- brolumir 2mo agoExcellent old soviet cartoon based on this story (english subtitles) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0
- Urb_RS 2mo ago[flagged]
- rnbnnnn 2mo agoYou shouldn’t use straight quotes in that font.