12017-06-26T08:01:46-07:00there will come soft rains...5plain2018-02-03T22:35:12-08:00Is this what it feels like to be Mrs. McClellan? Is there a chance of showers?
Mrs. McClellan is an absent character in a chapter of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (a cautionary tale), "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950). While the human characters are no longer present, the smart house lives on. Eerily, it continues to serve the absent humans, laying out food, reading poems, and providing hourly reminders of the lives no longer lived within the house. It is a hauntingly beautiful depiction of technological ambivalence and anxiety, the agency of non-human agents, and a space in which humans and non-humans lived together, albeit one in which (as usual) the non-humans serve the humans.
Several artists have based their works on this story. Particularly notable works include: