Illustration © Dominic Sinclair | dreamstime.com
Listen to this post:
Tuesday was the day when Ray Bradbury’s classic short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” was to take place back when he wrote it in 1950.
“Today is August 4, 2026,” an automated voice says towards the beginning of the story. It’s a modern house with all sorts of electronic features. The oven makes breakfast for the family, robot mice keep the house clean, and the computer is constantly reminding the family that, for example, it’s time to leave for school.
The problem, we soon learn, is that the house is devoid of life, since humanity has been wiped out by a worldwide nuclear war.
Originally a short story, “There Will Come Soft Rains” became the penultimate chapter of Bradbury’s “accidental novel” The Martian Chronicles, in which he collected a couple dozen of his stories about the red planet, where he often wrote people migrated to escape the craziness of Earth, where especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s the prospect of a nuclear conflagration felt very real.
I read the story again on Tuesday and re-experienced the chill I got when I first encountered the story sometime around 1968, when Aug. 4, 2026, seemed like the far distant future.
I found myself wondering how many world leaders since then, with access to nuclear codes, have read the story and said to themselves, “No. Not on my watch.” How many lives were saved because Bradbury painted such a realistic picture of everyday life after life on Earth has been eradicated?
I also wondered if the author picked an August date at random, or was he conscious, five years after the fact, of the significance of this month in the history of atomic warfare? It was August 1945 when the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated in the only two deployments of a nuclear weapon ever directed against human beings.
On this 81st anniversary, it behooves us to remind ourselves of that horror and recommit to any and all efforts to find peaceful means to settle our differences and especially never again to resort to using such terrible weapons.
