“There Will Come Soft Rains”: Bradbury’s miniature apocalypse
Today is August 4th, 2026. Today is the original setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” from The Martian Chronicles.1 Bradbury himself once described this story as best representing the essence of his work,2 and I know of no story more appropriate for today. It’s also only about 2,000 words, if you want to read it before we continue.3
Bradbury’s 2026 is both mundane and alien. The story’s location – and main character – is a smart home on the outer edge of the San Francisco Bay area. Writing from 1950, Bradbury imagined the home’s mechanisms controlled by a heavy electromechanical brain in the attic, but it’s easy to hear Alexa’s voice reading the morning reminders. “Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.”
We see the house going through its daily routine, oblivious to the absence of its McClellan family inhabitants. All we see of them are shadows – in the habitual meals and activities the house still prepares, the reminders it still speaks into the empty air, and more literally in the remaining spots of white paint on the exterior wall, where their vaporizing bodies shielded the house’s wood from an atomic flash. This house is the last one standing in the city.
Hiroshima, August 6th 1945
Most apocalyptic fiction is bleak, following the last few survivors in a withered world. But this story strips out the humans, and replaces them with humanity. It’s the scale that does it for me: one house is the setting for a contemplative literary piece about daily life. It just so happens this one is surrounded by radioactive ruins.
So when the last embers of that daily life burn out, the grief is personal. The smart home is consumed by fire – paralleling the city, and presumably the world. Bradbury’s masterful prose makes the fire a character, too: a clever and heartless attacker relishing its assault on the house.
“There Will Come Soft Rains” is clearly a story of the atomic age. But it’s as relevant as ever on the real August 4, 2026 because Bradbury is himself looking backwards. The title comes from a 1918 poem by Sara Teasdale, which Bradbury’s story quotes in full: the house reads it during Mrs. McClellan’s usual evening poetry hour. It, too, recounts the end of humankind, but a much quieter one:
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.
Teasdale’s apocalypse was the Great War and the Spanish Flu. Bradbury’s apocalypse was the atom bomb, and he feared that we would bring the natural world to the grave with us, leaving behind a dead Earth. Now our apocalypse is superintelligent AI, and we fear that not even a dead Earth will survive us. After all, its atoms can serve other purposes.
The apocalypse isn’t just the end of the world. It’s the end of each of our worlds: our morning cup of coffee and our flower garden and our family dog. But Bradbury’s apocalypse hasn’t happened – nor has Teasdale’s, nor our own. Where there is life, there is hope. And as Bradbury teaches us, there is so, so much life.
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