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.
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!).
Off the top of my head, events in popular science fiction that have "already occurred":
First Laughing Man Incident - Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2024)
Third Impact - Neon Genesis Evangelion (2015)
Fourth Corporate War - Cyberpunk (2022)
Geisel Library Walk - Rainbows End (2025)
2020 Tokyo Olympics - Akira (2020)
Very good timing, not for walking houses and sharding of consensus reality with ubiquitous AR, but for physical destruction of books to speed up scanning.
Domingo Gonsales is flown to the moon by tying himself to wild swans, and meets Lunar Christians - The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin (1601)
Manned mission to the Moon by giant gun - Jules Verne (1865 ish).
Manned trip around Saturn by comet - Jules Verne (1877).
Time traveller sets off to the future - H.G. Wells (1894)
Martian invasion of Earth - War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1905)
Global telephone network reaches as many connections as a human brain and wakes up - Dial 'F' for Frankenstein, Arthur C Clarke (December 1, 1975)
Birth of Dr Susan Calvin, founding of US Robotics & Mechanical Men, development of 'Positronic Brain' - Asimov's robot stories (1982 and after)
British space station under construction - The Outward Urge by John Wyndham (1994)
Portal to parallel universes - Sliders (1994)
Doctor Samuel Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanishes - Quantum Leap (1995)
Skynet becomes self-aware - Terminator 2 Judgement Day (August 29, 1997. at 02:14 am Eastern Time)
HAL 9000 AI computer operational (1997), first human voyage to Jupiter system (2001), first landing on Europa and alien life discovered (2010) - Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey
Moon leaves Earth Orbit after nuclear waste explosion, taking human-occupied Lunar colony with it - Space:1999 (13 September 1999)
Efficient international flight, using Zeppelins and blimps - Rudyard Kipling (2000)
Global climate disaster - The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Replicants - Bladerunner (2016)
Keanu Reeves smuggles digital information in his brain - Johnny Mnemonic (2021)
Arnold Schwarzenegger kills to survive in a typical American TV show - The Running Man (2025)
Woman relifed into robot, rich people discover workers' rights - Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2026)
First colony mission to Mars, 100 colonists on the largest spaceship ever built - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (2026)
Tibetan monks finish listing all the names of God, stars start going out - The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke (when computers were rentable and could print 1000 names per second)
> 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.
> "Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "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."
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.
I 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.
I 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.
There Will Come the Soft Rains feels like it was written right after a visit to the World's Fair back in the Atomic Era. A critique of the unlimited promises about the future but virtually no thought put towards the possible consequences of said future. It's a very post-war story.
What'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.
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...
Lots of places still use PVC covering commonly called linoleum. And laminate that I see everywhere is not so technologically remote, with its plastic surface.
> But he still thought we'd be having linoleum on our floors...
Yes, but no. He's writing a story about a character (the automated house) that needs lots (relative to the story length) of explaining. "Linoleum" very quickly conveys "kitchen floor", helps anchor the story in details familiar to his readers - and most of those readers would know linoleum is quite flammable, so it also advances the plot.
Futurism is a heavy theme in most SF writing, but you shouldn't let futurism get in the way of good story writing.
I'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.
It 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.
Bradbury 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.
The 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.
The 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.
Perhaps not, but there's no functional difference to the millions (hundreds of millions even) of victims if you start hitting major population centres.
You're not kidding. I read this in the late 70s, and it's a bit of a gut punch to revisit it now, on the very day of the story, in a world where smart homes are somewhat there and nuclear saber-rattling is once again the theme of the day.
Of course, writing about the future means you won't get everything right - especially once specific dates or years enter the picture and technologies are in use that haven't been invented (or invented and discarded) yet. Nobody predicted that World War III would last as long as it has, or be so full of utter stupidity. On the technological front, film projectors are relics in this era, and film-based storage never really caught on. On the other hand, videotape wasn't around in 1950, and even audio tape was a fairly new technology.
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.
Earth 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.
> 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.
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.
"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!
Cooking 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.
Yeah. 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.
Ray 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.
This is such a surprising comment! Bradbury's style is very sparse and plain, and much closer to Hemingway's end of the spectrum than to the other. Where would you put, say, Nabokov, Melville, or Lovecraft?
Ecclesiastes 1:1~11 (where that title is from) talks about futility, using only verses that are hopeful. (but that is lost on newer translations because the language was simplified. see legacy standard or Brenton's Septuagint for the effect)
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.
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.
With 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"
It 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.
It'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.
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.
After the apocalypse, this story will appear every August on HN, even though there’s no-one left to read it. But there will, somehow, still be complaints about the dup.
112 comments:
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
Does Tiny Desk have the best sound engineers or what ?
Tiny Desk, along with KEXP, are absolutely brilliant at what they do.
An emphatic yes. It's a strange coincidence that I wanted to name KEXP too in my previous comment.
London Grammar @ KEXP ranks pretty high.
They constantly blow my mind, especially with the more recent Napalm Death tiny desk concert.
Thank you very much for making me aware of this wonderful artist.
Reminded me of how deadmau5 named his track The Veldt after the homonymous story by Ray Bradbury.
And if your in the mood for a hard rain there is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvZmrygK3F0&t=3790s
Probably the best cover.
An obligatory mention, also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEtQfqpKi1I
Thank you. Had not heard this one before.
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!).
Reminds me of when November 2019 came and went (the date that Blade Runner is set in)
Off the top of my head, events in popular science fiction that have "already occurred":
> Rainbows End
Very good timing, not for walking houses and sharding of consensus reality with ubiquitous AR, but for physical destruction of books to speed up scanning.
Vernor Vinge has always been uncommonly prophetic, even by Sci Fi author standards.
Domingo Gonsales is flown to the moon by tying himself to wild swans, and meets Lunar Christians - The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin (1601)
Manned mission to the Moon by giant gun - Jules Verne (1865 ish).
Manned trip around Saturn by comet - Jules Verne (1877).
Time traveller sets off to the future - H.G. Wells (1894)
Martian invasion of Earth - War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1905)
Global telephone network reaches as many connections as a human brain and wakes up - Dial 'F' for Frankenstein, Arthur C Clarke (December 1, 1975)
Birth of Dr Susan Calvin, founding of US Robotics & Mechanical Men, development of 'Positronic Brain' - Asimov's robot stories (1982 and after)
British space station under construction - The Outward Urge by John Wyndham (1994)
Portal to parallel universes - Sliders (1994)
Doctor Samuel Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanishes - Quantum Leap (1995)
Skynet becomes self-aware - Terminator 2 Judgement Day (August 29, 1997. at 02:14 am Eastern Time)
HAL 9000 AI computer operational (1997), first human voyage to Jupiter system (2001), first landing on Europa and alien life discovered (2010) - Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey
Moon leaves Earth Orbit after nuclear waste explosion, taking human-occupied Lunar colony with it - Space:1999 (13 September 1999)
Efficient international flight, using Zeppelins and blimps - Rudyard Kipling (2000)
Global climate disaster - The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Replicants - Bladerunner (2016)
Keanu Reeves smuggles digital information in his brain - Johnny Mnemonic (2021)
Arnold Schwarzenegger kills to survive in a typical American TV show - The Running Man (2025)
Woman relifed into robot, rich people discover workers' rights - Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2026)
First colony mission to Mars, 100 colonists on the largest spaceship ever built - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (2026)
Tibetan monks finish listing all the names of God, stars start going out - The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke (when computers were rentable and could print 1000 names per second)
and many more: https://scifi.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_fictional_future_e...
The Olympics were canceled(postponed) due to a plague, so that tracks
Events of Back to the Future II (2015-10-21)
Perhaps dating myself...
2001: A Space Odyssey (2001)
Don’t forget 2021-01-17, “This is your wake up call. Thank you for staying at the New Darwin Inn.”
Johnny Neumonic (movie, 1995)
Too bad we dont have large data minidiscs by now (or rather: anymore)...
Several years ago when a meme about Back to the Future was going around I made: https://gifyu.com/image/blAbD
I didn't get the link to the current date. But aside from the fact there was no Mars linkage probably my favorite Bradbury short.
> 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.
> "Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "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."
The future arrived quietly
It is now public domain ?
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.
I 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/Y7VyGb1w
I 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.
There Will Come the Soft Rains feels like it was written right after a visit to the World's Fair back in the Atomic Era. A critique of the unlimited promises about the future but virtually no thought put towards the possible consequences of said future. It's a very post-war story.
You 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.
I have a friend who often goes for walks at midnight or later, around a rather nice part of town.
He gets the cops called on him regularly. It's insane.
And what do the cops think?
What'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.
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...
>he still thought we'd be having linoleum on our floors...
We still do! Idk if that is changing anytime soon in my life at least.
Lots of places still use PVC covering commonly called linoleum. And laminate that I see everywhere is not so technologically remote, with its plastic surface.
I'd hazard changes in taste are more random than technological progress.
The one that stuck out to me was all the automation, full breakfast etc but the house has to remind them to pay the bills.
> But he still thought we'd be having linoleum on our floors...
Yes, but no. He's writing a story about a character (the automated house) that needs lots (relative to the story length) of explaining. "Linoleum" very quickly conveys "kitchen floor", helps anchor the story in details familiar to his readers - and most of those readers would know linoleum is quite flammable, so it also advances the plot.
Futurism is a heavy theme in most SF writing, but you shouldn't let futurism get in the way of good story writing.
Linoleum became the premium option, now named marmoleum.
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.
I'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.
To quote an obscure reference from my country:
Regarding linoleum let's agree to disagree. I for one appreciate it.
It is still present in my region to an extent. This year my relative bought an apartment where the kitchen floor is made from it.
It 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.
I mean, LVP is very popular today and is really not much different from Linoleum.
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.)
Bradbury 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.
Better quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quyaaszg6jc
> 1987
correction: 1984
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
The 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.
The 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.
The world doesn't have enough nuclear weapons for "total nuclear annihilation".
To 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.
Perhaps not, but there's no functional difference to the millions (hundreds of millions even) of victims if you start hitting major population centres.
There's plenty enough to make the second-worst war in human history look like an enjoyable beach vacation by comparison.
You're not kidding. I read this in the late 70s, and it's a bit of a gut punch to revisit it now, on the very day of the story, in a world where smart homes are somewhat there and nuclear saber-rattling is once again the theme of the day.
Of course, writing about the future means you won't get everything right - especially once specific dates or years enter the picture and technologies are in use that haven't been invented (or invented and discarded) yet. Nobody predicted that World War III would last as long as it has, or be so full of utter stupidity. On the technological front, film projectors are relics in this era, and film-based storage never really caught on. On the other hand, videotape wasn't around in 1950, and even audio tape was a fairly new technology.
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.
Today is August 4, 2026
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.
Oh, 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
Earth 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.
"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.
You left out the best part:
> The planet is fine, the people are fucked.
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! :-)
But it recognizes the dog. Priorities.
"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!
> Bradbury describes the fully automated smart home, but its technology does obviously not extend into the garden exterior.
In the 7th to last paragraph, second sentence, he lists the automated processes still going, including "cutting the lawn by remote-control mower".
People still cook in houses with microwaves and wash dishes despite owning dishwashers
Cooking 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.
Well I enjoy mowing my lawn (with a mechanic mower of course). Anything but the office chair and monitor.
Boy, I hope somebody got fired for that blunder!
Yeah. 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.
My all time favourite writer. No sci-fi writer could describe the launch of a rocket any more poetic than Ray Bradbury.
Bradbury wrote rockets the way other writers wrote sunsets
Ray 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.
This is such a surprising comment! Bradbury's style is very sparse and plain, and much closer to Hemingway's end of the spectrum than to the other. Where would you put, say, Nabokov, Melville, or Lovecraft?
Haven’t read Nabokov, but Lovecraft is on the Bradbury end of the spectrum, but I love Lovecraft lol
To each his own, I suppose.
I particularly like Bradbury's style. It reads very prose poetic. One of my favourite is Dandelion Wine, which you will probably hate.
As "Forever and the Earth" shows it wasn't just stylistic, but essential.
Ecclesiastes 1:1~11 (where that title is from) talks about futility, using only verses that are hopeful. (but that is lost on newer translations because the language was simplified. see legacy standard or Brenton's Septuagint for the effect)
Interestingly, I had the exact opposite reaction - I enjoyed the writing itself, but didn't find the premise all that interesting.
My friend, we exist at opposite ends of a spectrum ha
Honestly I'm just tired of the doom and gloom. I should probably keep in mind this was written in 1950.
Try some Arthur C Clarke, less doom and gloom
Childhood's End by Clarke is quite high on my list of grim endings for the human race
his magnum opus Explode Eath and most of humanity, because of bureocracy apathy, in the first 10 pages. ...Oh I see now. nvm.
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
OT: 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.
With 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"
Thanks for sharing this gem.
"water, gas and light bills"
I assume light bills refers to electricity, as, especially pre war, that's what electricity was predominantly used for?
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.
Mandatory link: the Zarelli soundtrack, using Leonard Nimoy's reading.
https://open.spotify.com/track/0DflgiMYRQP3UXtZ47NBus?si=XGR...
Zarelli - Falling Light ft. Leonard Nimoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ekjpJWSvY
Yeesh how bleak
It 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.
I wonder if the date was chosen at random. Hiroshima is august, 6, after all.
if you find this to be bleak, don't read his "The Small Assassin", or much of anything in The October Country.
It'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.
One of my favorites of Bradbury’s.
Haunting.
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.
A speedy thermonuclear demise would have been better than this mess. Emphasis on speedy.
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.)
Yes, I set a calendar notification then.
Don't mind the dup, though.
After the apocalypse, this story will appear every August on HN, even though there’s no-one left to read it. But there will, somehow, still be complaints about the dup.