"August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains" addresses the central fear of its time—a nuclear holocaust. This is not uncommon for a work of science fiction written in the 1950s. In 1945, for the first time in human history, the end of the world became a real possibility, and writers of Ray Bradbury's generation were clearly influenced by that event. What is uncommon about "August 2026," then, is not its theme of nuclear disaster but its view of the technology that made such a disaster possible.
In general, from the time of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to the present, science-fiction writers have been faced with two mutually exclusive views of technological progress. Technology can offer the promise of a future paradise in which mechanization sets humans free from labor, hunger, and disease. Or, technology threatens to eliminate humans completely by making them, quite simply, obsolete. For Bradbury this either/or perception is far too simplistic. In "August 2026" he argues that utopia and dystopia are the same place.
The opening lines of the story introduce the reader to a house without inhabitants in a city without survivors in a world that may well be devoid of human life. The house seems to be the only structure still standing in Allendale, California, and all that is left of the McClellan family, who once lived there, are the silhouettes of their bodies left on the outside of the west wall by the nuclear firestorm. In this posthuman story the house serves as the central character.
The house is fully automated, capable of waking its inhabitants in the morning, reminding them of appointments and bills to be paid, preparing their meals, doing the dishes, cleaning, setting up tables for an afternoon bridge game, and even reading them poetry in the evening. It operates without the need for human intervention or decision, and so it continues to do its various tasks even when those it once served are gone. The house does not know this, of course, though it does seem to have a kind of electronic awareness and capacity for thought. Bradbury offers the house an emotional life of sorts by giving it a maternal voice ("Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today") and instilling it with "an old maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia."
The story chronicles the last day in the life of the house, August 4, 2026, almost 81 years to the day after the first atomic bombs were used against a civilian population in Japan. The day seems ordinary enough, despite the fact that there is no family within the walls of the house and perhaps no world outside. But this is not an ordinary day. At noon the family dog appears at the door sick with radiation poisoning. The house recognizes the animal's voice and lets it in, but it soon dies, and the cleaning mechanisms dispose of the carcass coldly and efficiently.
Then at ten o'clock, writes Bradbury, "the house began to die." There is an accident; the wind blows a tree branch through the kitchen window, and a bottle of cleaning solvent splatters across the hot stove. The fire spreads quickly, and though the house tries to save itself with its built-in defense mechanisms, it fails. By morning, only one wall is left standing, and an electronic voice repeats the same words over and over: "Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…."
The technology that makes this utopian house possible is the same technology that makes nuclear war possible, and Bradbury does not want the reader to overlook this connection. In fact, he implies that the difference between the house and the bomb is only one of degree. The technology of the mechanized house has already rendered human beings superfluous. The technology of war merely brings that process to its logical end.
In Bradbury's story neither nuclear technology nor the automated house is responsible for the cataclysmic holocaust. The truth is that humans have simply abdicated their position as the dominant species, if indeed they ever really held that position on earth. Despite technology, the end of human life in Bradbury's story is the result of a human crime, a crime of conscious omission.
The house is in the habit of reading poetry to Mrs. McClellan in the evening, and it does so even on this evening, choosing to read the Sara Teasdale poem that gives the story its title:
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.
"Four winds blowing thro' the sky, You have seen poor maidens die, Tell me then what I shall do That my lover may be true." Said the wind from out the south, "Lay no kiss upon his mouth," And the wind from out the west, "Wound the heart within his breast," And the wind from out the east, "Send him empty from the feast," And the wind from out the north, "In the tempest thrust him forth, When thou art more cruel than he, Then will Love be kind to thee."
Set in a post-apocalyptic landscape, this story presents death as pervasive. The reader encounters the death of the McClellan family, their dog, their city, and the house. Related to this relentless dying, Bradbury emphasizes the omnipresence of time, structuring the story around the house’s automated announcement of each hour of the day. The ever-ticking clock announcing every hour suggests the McClellan family’s tendency towards efficiency and control down to the minute. When coupled with the unpredictability and finality of death, however, this obsession with controlling time appears both misguided and futile.
Bradbury depicts multiple instances of death to underscore that there is no way to control or subdue it. Death can come in “one titanic instant,” as it does for the McClellan family. The father, mother, and two children were all engaged in regular occupations when an atomic bomb exploded. Their bodies incinerated, and all that remains are their white silhouettes on the side of the house. Nothing in the story suggests that the family knew that this moment would be its last. In particular, the ball pictured midair “which never came down” emphasizes how instantaneous this death was—faster than gravity.
Death is also indifferent. When the family dog approaches the house, Bradbury quickly establishes it as a sympathetic figure by saying it is “whining, shivering” and that it “ran upstairs, hysterically yelping” in search of its owners. Its lonely end, then, leaves the reader with a sense of loss, and underscores the unfeeling, indiscriminate nature of death. And above all, death is final. In only a few moments, it can undo work that took centuries to create. When the house catches on fire, for example, the flames start “baking off the oily flesh” of “Picassos and Matisses,” destroying artwork by two of the most influential painters of the 19th and 20th centuries. Death not only destroys life, then, but even the legacy human beings would attempt to leave behind.
Closely linked to the inevitability and unpredictability of death is the unstoppable march of time. The existence of death means that everyone’s time is limited and fundamentally beyond their control. Nevertheless, this society seeks to measure and optimize time whenever possible. This is reflected in the structure of the story, which is firmly rooted in the passing of hours. It opens with the date, followed by an alarm clock announcing that it is 7:00 a.m. Every few paragraphs, a robotic voice again announces the time. The clock further highlights the extent to which the McClellans attempted, before their deaths, to control every aspect of their day. In each hour, the house has something new planned for the family. First, they eat breakfast, then they go to work, then the house cleans up after them, and so forth. So meticulous is the house about time-keeping that if it is in any way interrupted, it becomes irritated. For example, when the dog enters, it is followed by “angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.” The dog requires additional time and attention, disturbing the house’s planned schedule for the day. Of course, this schedule is already absurd, given the death of the house’s inhabitants. This suggests the naïve futility of attempting to meticulously control every moment of one’s day—and, it follows, of one’s life. There will always be disruptions, the most devastating and final being death itself.
Bradbury holds no sympathy for this desire to control time because he recognizes that it is futile—death and time progress regardless of any and all efforts to the contrary. By naming the story after There Will Come Soft Rains, a poem by Sara Teasdale that is also read out during the short story, Bradbury makes his point of view clear. Teasdale offers a placid image of the world, complete with lovely scenes from nature, that is the result of humans destroying one another in a great war. This beautiful yet grim image of the future reveals that death will have its way with humans and that time will continue to march on without them.
In Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," the house is the last voice to speak as it continuously says, "Today is August 5, 2057, today is August 5, 2057, today is ...," as it burns down. This voice at the end is extremely haunting to the story as it demonstrates the absolute absence of humanity after a nuclear holocaust destroyed much of life in 2057.
Throughout the story, Bradbury creates images that demonstrate this...
In Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," the house is the last voice to speak as it continuously says, "Today is August 5, 2057, today is August 5, 2057, today is ...," as it burns down. This voice at the end is extremely haunting to the story as it demonstrates the absolute absence of humanity after a nuclear holocaust destroyed much of life in 2057.
Throughout the story, Bradbury creates images that demonstrate this absence of humanity while the robotic "life" continues to operate. The story's first paragraph demonstrates this: "The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeaing its sounds into the emptiness."
Perhaps the most haunting image in the story comes when Bradbury captures the moment a nuclear bomb detonated, killing each member in the household (except for the dog):
"The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down."
The purpose of this image is to show that the only life that's left is the artificial computerized house life. However, the house, without humans, is unable to solve problems. So when a tree crashes into the kitchen and starts a fire, the house is unable to save itself.