There Will Come Soft Rains (short story)

Characters and story

The story begins by introducing the reader to a computer-controlled house that cooks, cleans, and takes care of virtually every need that a well-to-do United States family could be assumed to have. The reader enters the text on the morning of August 4, 2026, and follows the house through some of the daily tasks that it performs as it prepares its inhabitants for a day of work. At first, it is not apparent that anything is out of the ordinary, but eventually it becomes clear that the residents of the house are not present, and that the house is empty. While no direct explanation of the nonexistence of the family is produced, the silhouettes of a man, a woman, two children, and their play ball are described as having been burnt into one side of the house, implying that they were all incinerated by the thermal flash of a nuclear weapon.

The house is described as standing amidst the ruins of a city; the leveled urban area is described briefly as emitting a "radioactive glow". The house is the only thing left standing, and continues to perform its duties, unaware that the family is gone. At one point, further insight into the demise of the family is given when a tape recorder within the house recites a poem by Sara Teasdale called "There Will Come Soft Rains". The poem describes how the Earth's other living things, and implicitly nature as a whole, are unaffected by an event of human extinction that has occurred as the result of an unnamed disaster.

At ten o'clock p.m., a gust of wind blows a tree branch through the kitchen window, spilling cleaning solvent on the stove and causing a fire to break out. The house warns the family to get out of the building and tries shutting doors to limit the spread. The house also attempts to fight the fire, but its water reservoirs have been depleted after numerous days of cooking and cleaning without replenishment. The building is ravaged by the blaze and is almost completely destroyed except for one surviving wall, the same wall with the shadows of the family burnt into it, which continues to give the time and date the following morning.

In the original Collier's story, the story's events take place in a deserted house in the city of Allendale, California, on April 28, 1985 (a year changed to 2026 in later printings). The title and motif of the story, as outlined above, comes from Sara Teasdale's 1920 poem, "There Will Come Soft Rains", which had a post-apocalyptic setting inspired by World War I. The imagery of the poem is echoed and expanded in the story.

Historical context

The story portrays a scene of obliteration, in which the human race has been destroyed by a nuclear war. The fear of the devastating effects of nuclear force was typical of the Cold War era. The world was still recovering from the effects of World War II and events, such as the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan, were fresh in the minds of citizens throughout the world. In 1945, the United States released the "Little Boy" Atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima that destroyed nearly everything in the city. Three days later, Nagasaki was also bombed. Tens of thousands of people died as a direct result of the bombings, a quarter of a million more perished of radiation poisoning within 30 days. Even though the war ended shortly after these events, the fear of retaliation and the increasing focus on the development of nuclear weapons by many military powers worldwide produced fear in the minds of people. After the war, tension increased between the two major military powers of the time, the U.S.S.R. and its satellite states, and NATO including the United States, culminating in the Cold War. This was a time of uncertainty, and the possibility of nuclear war was a daily fear.

Adaptations