Books like There Will Come Soft Rains

One of Ray Bradbury’s most poignant short stories, this also has one his most recognized scenes.Quietly, somberly describing a smart house after a nuclear holocaust, Bradbury uses this Cold War theme as a vehicle to explore our technological advances and how those same advances can lead to dehumanizing results.The title comes from Sara Teasdale’s 1920 poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” and Bradbury quotes the text and uses the lyric quality of the work to emphasize his own message:“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 fireWhistling their whims on a low fence-wire;And not one will know of the war, not oneWill care at last when it is done.Not one would mind, neither bird nor treeIf mankind perished utterly;And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,Would scarcely know that we were gone.”First published in 1950 in Collier’s Magazine, Bradbury shared with many of this era an anxiety about nuclear war. The memory of the United States’ bombing of Japan and the escalating weapons race with the Soviet Union provide a stark backdrop for the gentle, cautionary tale.One of his best short works.