There Will Come Soft Rains
The effects of a nuclear disaster are eerily described in the short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury. The story takes place in the dystopian 2026 where houses are highly automated assistants attending to every need of the resident—even when the residents have been vaporized from nuclear disaster. The story progresses through an entire day of the house maintaining itself until it dies from battling a fire resulting from a tree branch falling on it. Both the fire and house are personified, making it a fight between nature's creation and humanity's creation. For the house's daily poem, the house recites, “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.” Bradbury takes these lines from Sara Teasdale’s poem “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which directly inspired the short story. One main message of the story is that nature does not care if humans destroy themselves—it will adapt. The birds still fly outside (to the house’s annoyance) and the trees still grow, while all that is left of humans is their silhouette—an allusion to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
