There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
users.wpi.edu321 points by pmg101 a day ago
321 points by pmg101 a day ago
It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction.
In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon."
In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must come from gods’ magic.
This short story was particularly meaningful for me when I read it in school. I lived the same distance from New York City as the protagonist. And this was during the last days of the Soviet Union, which had placed my small hometown on its top 10 places to bomb list.
In Walter M. Miller Jr.'s book A Canticle for Liebowitz, we’re back in society that's recreating itself, with the Catholic Church acting as a centralizing force again, as after the fall of Rome and European plagues. Monks discover, collect, copy, and maintain shreds of texts.
Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.
> "It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction."
Quite the reverse. That people say that the fear of war (nuclear or not) is "quaint" means that the wealthy and privileged first world has forgotten about war and that's not a normal state of affairs. The 18th and 19th centuries were wracked by war after war between major powers, culminating in the First World War ("the war to end all wars" remember?) and then Second World War in the first half of the 20th century. It was very surprising to everyone that another global war hadn't materialized by the 1980s.
Fear not, military rearmament spending worldwide has shot upwards as nations prepare for the inevitable wars to see who will be the new global top dog. We are all about to re-learn some old lessons, albeit at a heavy cost.
Quaint? We are the closest we've ever been to nuclear annihilation, according to the experts: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/
Yes, it's not part of the daily fear and considerations people take anymore.
No more nuclear duck and cover drills; no more fallout shelters scattered around cities.
Look at the history of that clock and tell me if you think it's a useful timepiece.
Maybe this is a bit, but just a bit, better (though backward looking): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+bomb%2Cnuc...
For sure, but it doesn’t pervade public consciousness in the same way. Not sure why, perhaps because the memory of mass-scale war has faded with the previous generations.
Fear of nuclear war was useful for midcentury US elites because it could be transmuted into fear of Communism. Since 1991 it just isn't as useful for that purpose, so the culture industry doesn't push it anymore. Their use against Japan in WW2 has also (just about) fallen out of living memory.
That is likely true. But on its own terms, communism itself (and socialism) is an idea with deadly consequences.
This study estimates the number of 20th century deaths due to communism at 94 million: https://www.cato.org/commentary/100-years-communism-death-de...
I'm genuinely unsure why those was posted in response to my comment. Did you mean to reply elsewhere?
Whenever the "tens of millions killed by communism" number gets trotted out, it's invariably considering everybody who died due to lack of assigned resources under communism. Which is fine, but it means you need to go over to the west and count up all the people who died of preventable means (not to mention making per-capita adjustments) as well for a fair point of comparison.
Every person who died of preventable illness because they couldn't afford healthcare? Death by capitalism. Every dude who puts a bullet in their head because of financial strain? Death by capitalism. Every person who's ever died of complications of malnutrition while their country exports food (the U.K., large swathes of Africa).
Numbers are meaningless when you don't put them in context.
Nuclear annihilation on any sort of global scale is further off than ever in the past 60-70 years or so. The doomsday clock is mostly worrying about climate change, conventional war and Facebook boomers spreading and believing fake news.
I don't mean that things are fine, just that Nuclear annihilation is less of a concern than some make it out to be.
With the expiration of New Start earlier this year, there are no nuclear arms control agreements in effect between the US and Russia, which hasn’t been the case since the 1960s. Russia, China, and the US are all actively modernizing and developing new nuclear capabilities. China has been greatly expanding their nuclear arsenal, building hundreds of new silos. North Korea has an expansive set of tactical and strategic nuclear systems and are in strategic cooperation with Russia. Russia is 4 years into a destabilizing land war, have developed several new weapons systems, and are now in a nuclear weapon sharing agreement with Belarus. And I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of other things.
We are in a period of strategic instability and an arms race that is unlike anything we have seen in the last 50 years. You can quibble with the specifics all you want, but I don’t think anyone can argue that we are at a lesser risk of nuclear war that we were, say, 20 or 30 years ago
Russia is bankrupt, and can't develop anything because it sent its best and brightest people to be drone fodder, and they died. If there's a new nuclear power it will be Iran, and if there's a nuclear first strike it will be by Israel.
Risk of any use of nuclear weapons is quite different from "nuclear annihilation". There are vastly fewer and vastly less powerful nuclear bombs/warheads today than 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago.
The shelling of Mauripol in Ukraine at the beginning of the current war was roughly equivalent to Hiroshima in explosive yield. It had a lot more destructive power though, since it was distributed across a huge amount of explosions, and blast damage falls approximately with the square of distance to center of explosion.
Mauripol in 2022 was not a place you wanted to be in. When a bomb falls on top of you, it makes no difference if it is small nuclear or large conventional, you very much die anyway.
I'm not trying to make war seem nice or sell the idea that the world is heading in a great direction, I'm trying to make the point that nuclear annihilation is less of a threat today than before.
In addition, usage of tactical nuclear weapons comes up again and again from Russian sources, driven by the situation in the Ukraine war.
Plus the current US President has purged most of of the military leaders who might resist any unwise or unlawful orders regarding nuclear weaponry. (Or just in-general, for that matter.) Potential orders he mused-about during his first term.
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/03/military-officials-ousted-r...
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2024/10...
Yeah, the US regime has basically been speed running the impotent dictator's playbook. Start from a place of weakness and incompetence, and cause a bunch of senseless destruction to distract from it. Using tactical nuclear weapons would be right in line with that, especially after having started this quagmire in Iran with no way to win.
No. The past year has substantially nudged things in the other direction.
I'd say it's tough to say.
On the one hand, one of the major nuclear powers is embroiled in a war in Europe. Which is extremely bad news and clearly makes the probability of nuclear war increase.
On the other hand, we're getting better and better at targeting, which means much smaller warheads can get the job done. We have little use for 50MT behemoths any more (excepting doomsday weapons).
I mean, we have nukes, so we're one day closer to nuclear annihilation each and every day, and I'm not even an expert!
That they claim something so blatantly ridiculous is one of the reasons they have no credibility in my eyes.
>It seems quaint now,
Miller's situation is a little more nuanced - he was crew on an Allied Bomber that levelled the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy during World War I, falsely believing it was occupied by German troops. His subsequent PTSD was a driving force behind his subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism, and he uniquely imbues the novel with the structure and lexicography of a closed order. His fear was not so much war - atomic or otherwise - as it was the loss of knowledge and tolerance as a consequence of the cyclical and barbaric nature of human society.
Indeed he takes some other significant cues from Bradbury - who faced a similar, if less poignant, Road to Damascus moment upon learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
For example, the concept of 'Booklegging' is lifted wholesale from Fahrenheit 451, published a few years prior. Bradbury has oft-cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, and Miller makes his views very clear by the time we encounter the flanderised Atheist in the final third of Canticle - reinforcing his core theme of the juxtaposition of scientific progress and moral wisdom, and the shared thematic motif expressed by Montag in Fahrenheit 451 that the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction.
As such, it is clear to me that the fear of war - and the trendy nihilism imbued by the then innovative atomic variant - doesn't so much affect mid-century fiction as the cultural and societal upheaval seen as the Baby Boomers assumed their place as the generation in ascension. In many ways this echoed the post-WW1 Brideshead Revisted era of England, merely substituting a surplus of capital for a dearth of inheritors.
Thus, while both can be read as atomic jeremiads, they are more appropriately realised as treatises to the social and political mores at the time. The scare for the average American wasn't so much Nuclear as it was 'Red' - something that can be seen in the stubborn cargo-culting of very American Institutions and Practices in the post-apocalyptic canon. As can be seen across the US Sci-Fi Canon, preservation of self is often secondary to the preservation of American Exceptionalism; be it via an ICBM or the stochastic terrorism of McCarthy.
When I was in high school (late 70s) we lived on Hood Canal in Washington state less than 10 miles from the Bangor Nuclear submarine base. My dad would often joke that it was probably the best location to live when WWIII starts because we'd just be instantly annihilated instead of having to suffer through some kind of post-nuclear hellscape.
It shouldn't be astonishing. The bombs dropped in Japan did create nuclear shadows of human beings when their bodies were annihilated. When Bradbury wrote it (1950), that was very, very fresh.
It’s been a very long time, but I read Alas, Babylon in middle school.
I remember aspects of their modern existence also being problematic (IIRC a house in florida with lots of windows doesn’t fare well without AC)
On topic of fear of nuclear war:
After reading Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, I'm surprised we as a species are still around.
A book I highly recommend, but personally found distressing to read, especially the chapter on the strategy of targeting civilian populations, which continues to haunt me.
Reading Philip K. Dick's short stories in publication order is also quite something in that respect. It was so pervasive in his early stories.
Beautifully articulated, but I have to disagree with you on nuclear power. We're close to the point where renewables and battery tech are a solution to all our power needs. Remaining obstacles being primarily political / geopolitical.
Meanwhile, after 70 years we're still no closer to a safe long term solution for nuclear waste. Every new and untested nuclear reactor design falls into the same pro-innovation bias of failing to address it's own unintended consequences. Like the utterly wild and rarely estimated cost of decommissioning older plants.
and the climate is so hot that nuclear power plants are having to be shut down so their waste heat doesn't sterilize their cooling rivers.
We also don't fully appreciate how much this shaped the American Baby Boomer psyche. My dad talks of regular Nuclear War drills in elementary school.
Or a certain cohort of Gen X who were old enough to watch The Day After or Threads and comprehend the possibilities.
I read this story in 4th grade. It felt like the future. Now, it feels like most of the technology is within reach - at least, it could be built. The automated stove being the main exception.
But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.
> In the living room the voice-clock sang, Connecting to Brand(tm) servers... Connecting to Brand(tm) servers... Connecting to Brand(tm) servers...
The fridge dispensed a verification can.
Which of these apocalyptic landscapes contain traffic lights?
Minecraft Bedrock Edition (the one Microsoft most heavily pushes) uses a traffic light to show when you need to pay more money, I heard.
In the real 2026, the automated firefighting system wouldn't work - it would lose connection to the internet and fail to verify whether the customer is still enrolled in the Max Protection Pro subscription.
> But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.
It's actually one way this story about the apocalypse is more hopeful than the present day. We don't need the internet to make most of the things in that story work, but in our timeline we'd add it anyway to get and sell those good analytics.
Except that isn't really why it happened: iot being Internet tied is because it's much, much easier to get devices to work when you control at least one side of the server with skilled professionals rather then your average home user.
And no one has really come up with an alternative: home assistant is good, but it's not for the non-techy.
I will squarely blame IPv4 for some of this: NAT has meant that the key application people might want to use is broken by default (remote device access) without mediation servers.
> it's much, much easier to get devices to work when you control at least one side of the server with skilled professionals rather then your average home user.
No, practicality is not the main reason these unnecessary connections are added. The main reasons are 1. to sell and enforce subscriptions and 2. to collect and sell data.
Is it just easier to get your car seat warmers to work when they can connect to the internet and make sure you're paid up?
IoT works just fine with Zigbee that can be 100% local.
Most of which you don't need IMO. When a bunch of stuff had to be redone after a kitchen fire, I told my electrician that I wanted everything to be dumb.
Did IoT cause the fire?
No. A 15-year old (so not ancient) dumb microwave.
Not a luddite but, aside from a couple of Alexas, just no need for any IoT.
How did you start a fire with a microwave? Plain old electrical fire, rats eating wire insulation?
Apparently a short circuit in the control panel in the middle of the night. At least that's what the investigator said. I wasn't using it and was asleep. So I didn't start it. Was spontaneous. Didn't seem to be related to any external wiring.
The vision of the automated stove is partly fulfilled, at least around San Francisco, by the astounding number of people who get all their meals delivered, for the moment by humans but soon robots.
Check out Home Assistant.
This. Not only does everything still work in an internet outage, mine actively detects and heals most internet outages by power cycling the modem with a smart plug.
We're closer to the stove, kind of. At least with things like Tovala. I've never actually met someone with one though.
I really wish we could just get a thermal imager integration for a stove which could catch a pot of boiling water about to boil over and back off the heat automatically.
Okay, a stretch for HN, but: singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada named an album released last year Vendrán Suaves Lluvias (meaning There Will Come Soft Rains). She talked about how she and her brother read The Martian Chronicles as kids and she remembered the Sara Teasdale poem quoted at the end. She said she composed the songs at a difficult time in her life and, I guess, something about that image in the story (and the poem in it) resonated then.
For anyone curious, there's a Tiny Desk Concert of songs from the album at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9PoZ0Vcb_s and an interview, in English, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcQbB7Dc83U
Does Tiny Desk have the best sound engineers or what ?
Tiny Desk, along with KEXP, are absolutely brilliant at what they do.
An emphatic yes. It's a strange coincidence that I wanted to name KEXP too in my previous comment.
London Grammar @ KEXP ranks pretty high.
They constantly blow my mind, especially with the more recent Napalm Death tiny desk concert.
Reminded me of how deadmau5 named his track The Veldt after the homonymous story by Ray Bradbury.
And if your in the mood for a hard rain there is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvZmrygK3F0&t=3790s
Born in 1968 I missed “duck and cover” but rode the wave of Reagan brinkmanship with my skater friends until 1990, watching all the broadcast TV PSAs and songs and art about nuclear war. It was real. It pervaded daily life: the notion that two old white men were having a pissing contest with every human as disposable bargaining chips. And as always, 25% of the US population cheered for purification of the planet because Jesus was coming (see: Hal Lindsay).
"... two old white men were having a pissing contest ..."
This is the big mistake that so many people make: assuming that these folks are behaving irrationally, or somehow focused on something other than what is best for humanity or their own country.
The unfortunate truth is that these people are actually behaving rationally, and doing what they believe is in the best interest of their own country or even society at large. They are doing their best.
And, if you were thinking coolly and clearly, you would likely do the same things in their shoes.
This doesn't at all mean we're doomed - in fact quite the opposite. These are hard things to navigate (nukes, AI, etc) but we're up to the task and will come out the other side much better off.
I disagree; I think the mistake is assuming that people always act rationally, all of the time.
I've always thought, easily, we humans were our own worst enemy. But that's nothing new, it's been known for many different eras. What gets me is we don't seem to care. Obviously many do, but why not enough?
Egomaniacs seem to always be the problem, but when one pops up in a country, the people, whether they have a choice or not, protect/ignore them. Your disposable remark, to me, is the key. Most need to wake to this fact and at least talk about it. (As for Hal Lindsay, he's just like any other nutjob author who uses grains of some truth to create fear and anxiety to promote his narrative.)
I'm born in Norway in 1975, and in the early 80's, while we didn't have "duck and cover" we had regular air-raid siren tests and my primary schools basement was a bomb shelter that doubled as an activity space.
The sirens still exist, but the test schedule has slowed dramatically.
If only it was as low as 25% today.
Some members of the Trump administration / military say a specific goal is to bring about Armageddon, and have not been fired for it:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...
Other religious fanatics outside the gov’t take a more circumspect public stand on this particular holy war, but aim to use the Supreme Court to convert the US into a religious dictatorship.
Here’s a primary source; an interview with the defense secretary’s pastor:
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/06/nx-s1-5822558/pastor-doug-wil...
Your links do not substantiate your claim. There are quotes of Peter Hesgeth apparently expressing some pretty whacky beliefs, but not that particular one.
Hegseth is a crusader more than he's a bringer of Armageddon. Unfortunately, there are plenty of christian Zionists in the administration who do indeed want to bring about Armageddon. This other guardian article covers the topic much more thoroughly:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/...
Nothing there about wanting to bring about Armageddon.
Neither the "Christian" nationalists nor The Guardian seem to know much about the actual history of the crusades. Its interesting how people with opposite ideological lenses unite in believing the same myths.
Born a bit earlier. I remember growing up in the shadow of possible nuclear war and remember having nightmares about it.
And it would have happened for real if not for one man's refusal to push the button: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
That overhanging fear has been replaced by climate change and political instability but the foundations for it still remain.
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It's factual. With receipts.
What do you find unreasonably hateful in the statement?
Because those other groups are not privileged. Criticizing the people in power is always okay and it should be encouraged.
The parent comment is getting dunked on because it feels rich for the majority racial group to claim aggrieved status.
But I agree that adding the whiteness status of the men doesn't add to the story. The distinguishing characteristics of the men were they were rich and powerful. There are many people in the United States who despite their whiteness, suffer injustice, lived in poverty, and are oppressed by powerful interests.
The above does not erase the fact that systemic racism impacts Black and Hispanic Americans significantly to this day, and work to mitigate this should continue.
It is curious that the people threatening to destroy the world are always old white men, though, don't you think? I wonder if there's a reason for it.
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Is it? There are lots of wonderful US Christians who believe in kindness and compassion and love. There are also lots of US Christians who are deep into end-times insanity, like Christian Zionists. Perhaps the 25% number is high, but this is a very real thing.
I do not disagree that there are some, but 25% is a massive overstatement, not merely "perhaps" high.
It's hard to find specific surveys covering exactly that, but given the widespread belief among US adults that we are living in the end-times and beliefs in being raptured, 25% if anything seems low:
"About four-in-ten U.S. adults believe humanity is ‘living in the end times’"
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/08/about-fou...
"Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to believe they will be taken up in the biblical Rapture, according to a new YouGov poll."
"The September 23 poll of 4,041 U.S. adults found that 63 percent of Republicans said they would be more likely to be taken up, compared with 40 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of independents. "
https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-more-likely-to-believe-...
> Anywhere from 6 to 35% of the United States population is evangelical, depending on how "evangelical" is defined.
> In the 2016 presidential election, exit polls reported that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump
> Evangelicals generally view the Middle East through a dispensationalist biblical framework and strongly support Israel. Often perceived as the most vocal supporters of Christian Zionism in the West, they believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews and that the U.S. will be blessed if it blesses Israel. The establishment of the State of Israel was seen by many American Protestants as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, reinforcing their commitment to Zionism as a religious duty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism_in_the_United_S...
His source and claims seem backed up - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Great_Planet_Earth
Where do you see there that 25% of the U.S. population cheered for nuclear annihilation?
> Where do you see there that 25% of the U.S. population cheered for nuclear annihilation?
Anecdotally; Growing up in the NorthWest USA, I knew entirely too many (crazy to my mind yet considered perfectly "normal" by most "average" folk back then) people in the 1980s who genuinely believed that Revelations' "rain fire from the Heavens" in the bible meant "Nuclear War" and Jesus would arrive momentarily thereafter "leading a host of angels" to "rapture the faithful" and/or "smite the wicked" who survived that initial "rain of heavenly fire".
What scares me even more than that kinda craziness bein' way more common back then than it should'a been is that too many (still crazy people IMHO) still believe such madness today and some of those people are in charge of (or at least in positions of significant power) entire nations with huge stockpiles of WMDs at their disposal.
If you’re talking about Pete Hegseth, he I think is CREC, and they are post-millenialists, which means they think more so that the earth will get better and better and should build things that last to welcome in Christ when he returns.
25% might be low for the "better dead than red" crowd, given the lasting and widespread popularity of communism in the worker's paradise that is America.
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The rebuilding of the temple. Yeah that faction is still in power. Blows my mind.
USSR animated version (1984): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0
This clip is what introduced me to this story.
This adaptation is heavily modified, but I think it adds to the whole thing. Soviet artists had an uncanny talent for making everything that's unsettling even more so.
The bird scene at the end where it repeatedly smashes into the window really hit me... something this version does better than the original.
In the video it claims the date is December 31, 2026 at the 4:02 mark. I wonder why the animation changed the date from the short story.
We'll see this post again on that date!
Thanks for sharing. Soviet era animation was creepy in its own right. This adaptation doubly so.
Where'd the Turkey dinner come from if it's a nuclear wasteland?
All joking aside; an excellent animation
I think the idea is that the house had large amounts of storage and freezers that it could use to get ingredients for meals which it then cooked.
I'd be more interested why there seem to be fresh charred bodies in the morning.
Bradbury actually anticipated this on the Martian side and explicitly calls out frozen dinners.
The most striking incongruity with our modern era to me is that the family was all outside when the blast occurred. With pervasive screens, we just don't get outside like we used to.
And why on earth was that dad mowing when the house was able to take care of it?
That's one of the usual failures of science fiction: most authors imagine technological progress, but don't also predict what societal changes it might bring. So this family had a quaint picture-book suburban 1950s life, just with robots. Same as Asimov's Detective Baley smoked a pipe and had a traditional 1950s marriage with a stay-at-home wife - just with robots...
I don't know that it because Bradbury couldn't predict the changes. See The Veldt for example. It is more that painting an idyllic 1950's life cast a sharper contrast with the destruction and thus had stronger impact.
I think you have to distinguish what the author can imagine and what the audience could likely accept. Part of writing stories is engaging the readers, who have biases of their own.
The usual response here is, any author can predict the horseless carriage, only a true visionary will predict the traffic jam and road rage.
> Same as Asimov's Detective Baley smoked a pipe and had a traditional 1950s marriage with a stay-at-home wife - just with robots..
How do you know that will not happen in the future?
A hugely different society might look more like past than the present.
They don't even predict all the technological changes. I love how in William Gibson's Neuromancer they have VR, true AI, and even fancy orbital resorts, but not mobile phones!
The things we enjoy doing, we prefer to do ourselves. For example: coding.
Man, if only I wasn't so burnt out. I've still been day-dreaming about architecture and design for my side-projects. I haven't had a chance to sit down and get into the flow state like I used to.
I think an appreciable number of people upvoting this and reading it or re-reading it may not have noticed why it was submitted today (the date on which the story takes place is tomorrow!).
Reminds me of when November 2019 came and went (the date that Blade Runner is set in)
Off the top of my head, events in popular science fiction that have "already occurred":
First Laughing Man Incident - Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2024)
Third Impact - Neon Genesis Evangelion (2015)
Fourth Corporate War - Cyberpunk (2022)
Geisel Library Walk - Rainbows End (2025)
2020 Tokyo Olympics - Akira (2020)> Rainbows End
Very good timing, not for walking houses and sharding of consensus reality with ubiquitous AR, but for physical destruction of books to speed up scanning.
Vernor Vinge has always been uncommonly prophetic, even by Sci Fi author standards.
Domingo Gonsales is flown to the moon by tying himself to wild swans, and meets Lunar Christians - The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin (1601)
Manned mission to the Moon by giant gun - Jules Verne (1865 ish).
Manned trip around Saturn by comet - Jules Verne (1877).
Time traveller sets off to the future - H.G. Wells (1894)
Martian invasion of Earth - War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1905)
Global telephone network reaches as many connections as a human brain and wakes up - Dial 'F' for Frankenstein, Arthur C Clarke (December 1, 1975)
Birth of Dr Susan Calvin, founding of US Robotics & Mechanical Men, development of 'Positronic Brain' - Asimov's robot stories (1982 and after)
British space station under construction - The Outward Urge by John Wyndham (1994)
Portal to parallel universes - Sliders (1994)
Doctor Samuel Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanishes - Quantum Leap (1995)
Skynet becomes self-aware - Terminator 2 Judgement Day (August 29, 1997. at 02:14 am Eastern Time)
HAL 9000 AI computer operational (1997), first human voyage to Jupiter system (2001), first landing on Europa and alien life discovered (2010) - Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey
Moon leaves Earth Orbit after nuclear waste explosion, taking human-occupied Lunar colony with it - Space:1999 (13 September 1999)
Efficient international flight, using Zeppelins and blimps - Rudyard Kipling (2000)
Global climate disaster - The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Replicants - Bladerunner (2016)
Keanu Reeves smuggles digital information in his brain - Johnny Mnemonic (2021)
Arnold Schwarzenegger kills to survive in a typical American TV show - The Running Man (2025)
Woman relifed into robot, rich people discover workers' rights - Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2026)
First colony mission to Mars, 100 colonists on the largest spaceship ever built - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (2026)
Tibetan monks finish listing all the names of God, stars start going out - The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke (when computers were rentable and could print 1000 names per second)
and many more: https://scifi.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_fictional_future_e...
Don’t forget 2021-01-17, “This is your wake up call. Thank you for staying at the New Darwin Inn.”
Johnny Neumonic (movie, 1995)
Too bad we dont have large data minidiscs by now (or rather: anymore)...
Several years ago when a meme about Back to the Future was going around I made: https://gifyu.com/image/blAbD
I didn't get the link to the current date. But aside from the fact there was no Mars linkage probably my favorite Bradbury short.
> But aside from the fact there was no Mars linkage probably my favorite Bradbury short.
This story happens to describe events on Earth, but it's part of the same chronology as the rest of the Martian Chronicles stories. The story The Million-Year Picnic describes the same war from the perspective of a family who escaped to Mars.
As an aside, later editions of the book advanced all the dates by 31 years; those editions put this story in August 2057 instead.
> "Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr. Featherstone's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills."
One thing which I find striking here is that a modern home and attendant conveniences roughly embodies 10--15 horsepower of effort, or the work of 40 or so full time house staff.
Thus far, the only notable robots are little disks which vacuum up floors (and they're getting outlawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104371 ) and some innovations just haven't become widespread (an uncle of mine piped his home for a central vacuum system, compleat w/ a switch at each connection for on/off) --- I really can't recall a device with widespread demand since DVD and then Blueray players (or maybe the Wii? the PS2 counts as a DVD player arguably). I don't know anyone who has done more than read about "Smart Mirrors" for example....
What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand/distributed?
> What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand
One problem I see is that corporations insist on collecting and reselling our data. As a result, a lot of people are reticent to get much automation. They seem to accept it with TVs, but other devices - it's just too much of an intrusion.
I say "a lot of people" but I don't know how many people it is, exactly.
There was recently a bit of a controversy with a refrigerator that had a big monitor on the door. That could actually be a cool feature: it could show you what's inside before you open the door. You could access it remotely if you're at the store and trying to remember if you have milk at home. But of course, the company started putting ads on it, and undoubtedly they're selling your data.
> it could show you what's inside before you open the door
I've always thought it would be cool to have transparent doors so you could see inside without needing to open the doors. Obviously, most people do not have "neat" fridge interiors and would be considered ugly and not a good look. But having those cool spy room windows that go frosted or mirrored or some other opaque look with the flip of a switch could solve that. Which tech is less expensive: dimming glass or cameras and monitors?
It would necessarily let heat leak in
I wonder if you could use two sheets of glass, and have a double-paned system. Maybe even with vacuum or some gas that's an even poorer conductor of heat than air in it.
This is one for windows --- unfortunately, even the best such windows have a markedly lower R-factor than the much less expensive typical door construction.
Such refrigerators are available for commercial applications --- where the on-going energy usage is offset by the need for customer access, but it would be a huge impact on one's electric bill.
Bars, restaurants and supermarkets have glass fronted refrigerators and freezers the world over, and yes, most are double glazed.
They're just less efficient and more likely to break. In a commercial environment that's worth it to show off the contents, but the trade off is different in a domestic setting.
I mean, supermarkets have huge freezer and cooler cases with no doors at all. The efficiency loss is just the cost of merchandising.
This actually isn't so bad with chest freezers, as the cold air in the freezer doesn't mix too much with the warm air above.
I hate that I'm being an advertisement for the corporate appliance dystopia. I'm sure it's somehow loaded with a whole bunch of surveillance, ads, and other anti-features. And I'm pretty sure it was from a brand where repair parts are essentially nonexistent. But I was shopping for appliances recently and I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a fridge like this. I think the shaded glass was based on an LCD mechanism.
HN crowd is not representative of the world at large. consumers don't care. cost and convenience are primary motivators.
As far as I can tell, many “regular” people do care and alter buying decisions based on privacy concerns. They use words like “creepy” instead of technical ones, but the underlying discomfort is the same.
I doubt the vast majority of people objecting to ads are doing it because creepy privacy invading reasons compared to just simply who would actually want ads running on a screen on the fridge? Who would actually just stand in front of the fridge watching an ad? Unless they really do something stupid like keep the fridge locked until the ad finishes, but really, who do they think is going to pay attention to it?
> They use words like “creepy”
This is common for useless products, like smart glasses or pendant-style AI devices. When consumers have clear utility, however, most give away privacy quite willingly.
> When consumers have clear utility, however, most give away privacy quite willingly.
Exhibits 1, 2, and 3; "Smart" phones, "Smart" watches, and pretty much 90% or so of "apps" people install on either from their respective "app stores".
Onve again it's been shown that consumers do care when they are properly shown the extent of data collection and/or are allowed to opt out.
E.g. when iOS introduced "ask apps to not track", 96% of users clicked "do not track": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...
If consumers didn't care, companies wouldn't go to extreme lengths to hide the fact that they are tracking you, and to invent craxier and crazier dark patterns to trick you into giving up your data.
A screen with an ad on it is objectionable enough, even if the ad is untargeted.
> A screen with an ad on it is objectionable enough, even if the ad is untargeted.
Especially these days when pretty nearly the entire advertising industry has a whole library of "dark patterns" and psychological trickery they've effectively outright "weaponized" against the "consumer class".
The problem with ads is that they steal your attention to serve someone else’s commercial interests, whereas the objects in a home should serve its occupants’ purposes, practical or aesthetic. The fridge in particular is a site for displaying family information like the calendar, children’s artwork, etc. so an ad there, even an honest and passive one, is a violation.
the real problem with household robots is that they are either flimsy toys or dangerous machines, and there's not much in-between. If we were to build a humanoid robot that would just put laundry away (as described in a HN article a few weeks ago), it would need to be strong enough to lift a laundry basket, have advanced control systems to go up and down stairs, and also be safe/reliable/trusted enough not to hurt people or damage property. We can do these things (modulo the trust, probably) but the confluence of all of it gets very expensive very quickly.
People want Rosie from the Jetsons, but the compute power required would be astronomical, the mechanical systems would need maintenance, and there would be real safety concerns.
With LLMs, we've got the wisecracking figured out...
It's not expensive, it's an unsolved problem, the main issue for many years has been the modeling of cloth behavior. They already have a folding robot that means they have solved a significant chunk of it.
But the generalization of behaviors is also a large problem. Pick and place is mostly solved I believe, but translating your housework to pick and place in your apartment is still a bit off.
I'm not convinced safety is solved: given how often LLM's hallucinate and automated cars get confused, what happens when something unusual happens and the robot thinks a person's arm needs to be "folded" and breaks it? Or a person's clothing looks like the wall and a robot tries to move their arm through a person's chest?
Sure, for each individual situation one can imagine a safeguard but being in close proximity to unpredictable humans means there are unlimited edge cases... if a humanoid robot is strong enough to do something useful it is also strong enough to be dangerous.
Even simple dangers like pinch points on joints or not stepping on curious pets are an issue.
My son would adore a humanoid robot around the house, but could I leave him unsupervised around it?
Recent example in the news:
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-chess-playing-robot-grabs-and...
We don't build robots because the "hard/boring part" for the human is often NOT the hard part for the robot.
Take the dishwasher, for example, loading it is very hard for a robot, but easy and quick for a human. Washing the dishes is boring for the human, but a robot gets a sort of sick and twisted pleasure from cycling that dirty water around for hours on end.
In fact, we've removed some labor-saving features of houses (laundry chutes went away decades ago, and only recently has "laundry on the bedroom floor" become somewhat standard) for "safety".
MAKE DUMBWAITERS GREAT AGAIN
> Washing the dishes is boring for the human
I feel like the only person in the world who doesn't mind doing dishes. When we lived in the city, I feel like most of my friends would rather have an in-unit dishwasher than in-unit laundry. For me, doing dishes feels almost meditative.
(But I do hate folding/putting away clothes.)
Doing dishes by hand takes only slightly longer than loading and unloading a dishwasher. Especially modern dishwashers which don't really dry the dishes so you have to hand dry at least some of them before putting them away.
That may be the case but the dishwasher uses less power and water then you do washing dishes.
It's also not like I'm lacking for dishes that need hand washing anyway either: very large sauce pans, pots and chopping boards aren't fitting in the dishwasher anyway.
Fire safety is real. Ever seen a burned out house with an untouched bedroom because the door was closed?
I'd love a dumbwaiter simply for a place to queue items "this needs to get put away downstairs (next time I am downstairs)" etc. Instead I just use the shelf next to the stairs. Which doesn't work if I'm already carrying something to bring up/down stairs, and that pattern makes it so I'm likely to forget even when my hands are free.
I built a cart/track system that went from the basement to the outside via the bulkhead. It fulfilled that work pattern in some regards, but it also made it hard to use those stairs manually [0] so it also impeded getting things done. The design that kept the cart level used up way too much of the vertical space. The next version of this idea will be aimed chiefly at heavy things (with the commensurate work to tie down etc), and go through two transitions horizontal-sloped-horizontal,
[0] and yes blocking an exit is fire hazard I know I know
The thing I stumbled over was that the house owner was out mowing the lawn, something that we actually do have robots for nowadays. But then again, I do enjoy a good, meditative lawn mowing.
Only new models of robots are banned, FCC approval of previous devices still stands and therefore we can continue to purchase those models. They will just get additionally out of date.
> However, the US ban only covers new advanced robot models, not existing products that have already received FCC equipment authorization for sale in the US. The "action does not impact a consumer’s continued use of devices they previously acquired," the FCC says. "Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market relevant models approved previously.”
https://www.weaverobotics.com/
And Toyota robotics has been trying to solve loading dishwashers for at least 7 years.
And that's all the housework required really, vacuuming, mopping, dishwasher un/loading, picking random stuff off the floor, dusting is another minor thing to have done.
The vast majority of labor has already been solved with dishwashers and washing machines and dryers, electric ovens and stoves.
Loading dishwashers has been solved. Instead of moving the dishes from the storage place to the cleaning place, you just make them both the same place.
I do know at least one couple who have two dishwashers and just alternate which is being used for loading dirty dishes and which is being accessed for clean.
Yes. This is also called dish drawers. It's a dishwasher sized unit split into two independent parts.
My mother loves fridge magnets, and there was a functional magnet on the dishwasher. It consisted of two oblong wooden signs connected by a chain. The top had a magnet and the bottom dangler was reversible. The top read "DISHES ARE", and you could swap the bottom to read "CLEAN" or "DIRTY"
Now some may ask why anyone would need a sign for such an obvious status. But my parents are boomers, and they maintain a pipeline of dishes such that Dad licks his plate clean, then they are scraped into trash, then rinsed in the sink, then placed in the dishwasher. So perhaps the dishwasher may only be cutting grease and sanitizing, but to the uninitiated, we are thankful for that magnet-sign to tell us whether the dishes are clean, or just look that way.
They also rinse and clean many things before putting them in the trash or recycling. They don't even drink sugary sodas, but every Diet Coke can is meticulously restored to pristine metallic gleam before Dad stomps and crushes them.
I was pleased to augment Mom's magnet collection by traveling to Europe via London. Now there is an official TfL notice on her refrigerator to "MIND THE GAP".
It'll be a US or Japanese or South Korean robot since it's not allowed to come from China.
I'd be in favor of Apple entering that market.
I think they'll be a huge first-mover advantage because of the Chinese blockade preventing cheap clones.
Roomba made some of the first robotic vacuum cleaners and they were based in the US.
Nowadays, they are just more expensive and inferior to the Roborock ones though. But thanks to the wonder of protectionism soon the customer won't be able to pick the better product.
What's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society.
Also I think a better policy than blocking Chinese imports (which is probably not sustainable anyway) would be to require that the software be audited and comply with regulations. Same rules and regulations should apply to robots from all countries.
> What's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society.
Are you a commie? Everybody knows the free-market self-corrects itself if you are not performant enough or good enough, and that personal greed and egoism are the best proxy for society well-being. Nurture them and you will get the best possible society!
(yeah, I'm being sarcastic)
IMO the solution is antitrust enforcement that considers hardware, software, and services all different products/markets, and prohibits anticompetitive tying between them. Having a piece of hardware should not force you to use specific software to operate it. And choosing specific software to control your robot vacuum should not force you to use specific network services (for mapping or whatever else the software developer leaves out). Rather there should be competitive markets for software onto existing hardware, and for network services to provide features to that software. If a company develops software for a piece of hardware they manufacture, then every bit of documentation used to write that software should be made publicly available so that competing software can also create an implementation.
Then, casual auditing of the hardware/software would suffice to make sure they weren't bundling other types of product. And the main concern would boil down to data collection by Chinese services - for which the US Software industry could step in with alternatives. And then rather than merely banning "Chinese services", a US GDPR would go a long way towards setting general rules to alleviate the specific concerns regarding data collection / abuse. It would then be up to Chinese companies whether to comply or not.
We've been missing these general approaches because our domestic surveillance industry wants to continue abusing the market, and has stymied any such regulation that would encourage competition with them. But these are the types of general approaches we actually need, rather than simplistic import bans and other ham-fisted protectionism.
Sorry, in the US it's, AFAIK, now not allowed to come from anywhere but the US: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/fcc-bans-future-roomba...
The admin seems to have a tendency to fearmonger over China and then ban or tariff globally. Allies don't exist apparently.
> Allies don't exist apparently.
Aren't our only "allies" Russia and North Korea now?
Bradbury's 451 speaks of a world of wall sized TVs. More time for entertainment and pleasure seems to be the selling point of technology, yet once achieved, the target then moves again.
What people really want is to have purpose, not pleasure.
Amazon Alexa. You're a decade late.
Fair point.
I find the presence of a microphone sufficiently creepy that that was a non-starter for me, and I didn't pay attention after the initial launch.
A rendition of this was aired on X-Minus One
https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles/XMinusO...
Though it makes me mourn for life lost when I read it even now, I never cared much for “There Will Come Soft Rains”. It’s a story exploring how what we make could continue on without us (for a time). But “The Pedestrian” (1951) is included at the end. It’s the last two pages out of that six page PDF. I think that one’s more apt to modern life. I read that one ages ago and it unsettled me.
I relate strongly with The Pedestrian. I love going for long walks at odd hours.
In the United State police's defence once I was walking all by myself at 3 in the morning in Mountain View, peeking and crouching among the bushes for good shots with my camera. A police car approached me. It ended up being a non-threatening conversation. It was early 2002. All in all quite surprising given my brown skin and then long beard.
I once sat on the side of a busy path - not a road! - remote controlling a silly Halloween decoration on the other side. Three times police officers checked I was okay. One person stole the battery out of it.
There Will Come the Soft Rains feels like it was written right after a visit to the World's Fair back in the Atomic Era. A critique of the unlimited promises about the future but virtually no thought put towards the possible consequences of said future. It's a very post-war story.
You know what, you're right - The Pedestrian hit me much harder this time around than the first time I read it.
God, I love Bradbury.
I have a friend who often goes for walks at midnight or later, around a rather nice part of town.
He gets the cops called on him regularly. It's insane.
What's the most unsettling to me is that the one thing that makes it less apt to modern life is the implication that at 8 PM, everyone is at home. Nobody still working or commuting.
Eternal rains will come
We should say goodbye
And suffer on our own
As all our thoughts were wrongThank you for that.
I one of the reasons I liked the story was the embedded poetry. It adds a mindful stillness that creates a poignancy.
I feel like the modern version of this would have the neighbourhood largely intact, but humans killed via miniature drones.
Drives home the point how few anticipated that batteries would advance so much.
There are many ways this could all end, a nuclear war is still on the list.
"Wireheaded by social media so hard you're unemployable" is at least as plausible as a city-scale antipersonel drone strike; even Ukraine's strikes against Russia are around 1200-1800/day.
Why don't they strike Vlad with one of them?
I can think of many possible reasons.
I suspect the real answer is that between decoys and Russian intel agencies hiding him, and his grip on power that currently means he's going to be in range of useful air defence and a good bunker even if it's literally the last system Russia has left, they likely literally cannot at the present time.
(Not that it changes what I just wrote, but IIRC most of the Russian personel losses are short-range (20 km) antipersonel drones, the long-range stuff is currently targetting materiel, logistics, and whatever you count oil as, in so doing they only incidentally hit people).
you say that like trump wasn't stopped from launching nukes at iran by one of his military advisors.
Come to think of it, why hasn't Israel launched any? We know they have them, Iran knows they have them, and they're not as restrained.
My guess has always been the delicate balance of perception. Nukes are (rightfully) perceived to be beyond the basic destruction we've come to expect of war. They're a tool for annihilation. If you use them offensively the rest of the world will become so afraid of you that they'll nuke you so you can't nuke them. Israel isn't strong enough to entertain the idea that they could survive this.
I really don't think that country is worried about its international perception right now.
I would assume that while Iran doesn't have the material for a bomb, they have enough nasty material for an air burst to do significant long-term impact. They couldn't possibly use it unless Israel nuked them first.
Iran's previous leader - the one we killed - had a mandate to build up material for nuclear bombs but not actually develop a bomb. Its new leader also wants to develop a bomb.
The most interesting thing about science fiction to me isn't the things the authors get right, but what they get wrong. Like, the whole house talking in a ChatGPT voice, intelligent appliances, etc: brilliant prescience. But he still thought we'd be having linoleum on our floors...
>he still thought we'd be having linoleum on our floors...
We still do! Idk if that is changing anytime soon in my life at least.
Lots of places still use PVC covering commonly called linoleum. And laminate that I see everywhere is not so technologically remote, with its plastic surface.
The one that stuck out to me was all the automation, full breakfast etc but the house has to remind them to pay the bills.
> But he still thought we'd be having linoleum on our floors...
Yes, but no. He's writing a story about a character (the automated house) that needs lots (relative to the story length) of explaining. "Linoleum" very quickly conveys "kitchen floor", helps anchor the story in details familiar to his readers - and most of those readers would know linoleum is quite flammable, so it also advances the plot.
Futurism is a heavy theme in most SF writing, but you shouldn't let futurism get in the way of good story writing.
Linoleum became the premium option, now named marmoleum.
https://www.forbo.com/flooring/en-us/commercial-products/lin...
If fossil carbon ever becomes (commercially) scarce, vinyl might end up the premium choice.
I predict plank will always suck.
I've actually considered premium linoleum for the give underfoot. LVP is such a terrible flooring. Sure it's cheap to buy and install, but man you feel that cheapness.
To quote an obscure reference from my country:
Regarding linoleum let's agree to disagree. I for one appreciate it.
It is still present in my region to an extent. This year my relative bought an apartment where the kitchen floor is made from it.
It would be dull to write about all the great new building materials our houses are made and the utter lack of futuristic convenience we actually have.
I mean, LVP is very popular today and is really not much different from Linoleum.
reminded me of this joke
Tech enthusiasts: "Everything in my house is wired to the internet of things. I control it from my smartphone. My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I give it voice commands via Alexa, I love the future!"
vs
Programmers/Engineers: "I work in IT so my house has mechanical locks, mechanical windows, routers using OpenWRT, no smart home crap, no Alexa/Google assistants, no internet connected thermostats etc".
You forgot the punchline: "the smartest thing in my house is a printer, and I keep a gun next to it in case it makes a funny noise."
One of my favorite versions is read by Nimoy. https://web.archive.org/web/20200615075956/https://www.youtu...
Thanks for this. I read the written version while listening to Nimoy's reading in the background. :)
Dimension X, 1950: https://ia800901.us.archive.org/33/items/OTRR_Dimension_X_Si...
Burgess Meredith Reads Ray Bradbury, 1962: https://dn720300.ca.archive.org/0/items/meredith-bradbury/01...
Edit: Ray Bradbury read by Leonard Nimoy, 1975 https://archive.org/download/bradbury-nimoy/1-There%20Will%2...
This story was adapted into a short animated film in 1987:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc
(Russian, with subtitles.)
Bradbury was very popular in USSR. His Wikipedia page has an anecdote of a Soviet filmmaker recognizing him in a crowd and surprising the rest of the celebrities around who had no idea who Bradbury was. (Another such author would be Vonnegut.)
There was a Soviet publisher Kniga (Book) that published only books about other books: book art, technology, bibliophile stories and so on. One of their books was a collection of short stories whose main topic was books, reading, writing or similar. One of stories was Bradbury's "Forever and the Earth", translated, of course, but very well. I was a teenager then an I remember being deeply impressed by it. I knew Bradbury, of course, but mostly from sci-fi and he wasn't really a sci-fi author. (One of Soviet sci-fi writers pointed out that Bradbury was pretty much anti-scientific in his stance.) That story made Bradbury stand out for me.
I accidentally started a reread of Octiva Butler's Parable of the Sower in late 2024 (I'd read it many years ago, but forgot the timeline). It was eerie...
That is about the most prophetic scifi book I have read. Not in getting all the details right but in general vibe and direction.
Singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada named an album released last year Vendrán Suaves Lluvias (meaning There Will Come Soft Rains). She talked about how she and her brother read The Martian Chronicles as kids and she remembered the Sara Teasdale poem quoted at the end. She said she composed the songs at a difficult time in her life and, I guess, something about that image in the story (and the poem in it) resonated then.
For anyone curious, there's a Tiny Desk Concert of songs from the album at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9PoZ0Vcb_s and an interview, in English, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcQbB7Dc83U
(Shared this on another post of the story last night, figured I might as well here, too.)
Ray Bradbury is the best horror writer to have worked in a sci-fi milieu.
This story is one of only a couple sci-fi short stories to creep me out enough that I still remember them vividly decades later. (John Varley's "PRESS ENTER ■" is another.)
For most of my life it's felt like we've been moving away from this scenario, but lately it's felt like we're sliding back towards it
The great sleight-of-hand of the 20th century is that it never went away, we all just collectively decided to stop thinking about the fact that at every given moment for the rest of human history we'll never be more than thirty minutes away from total nuclear annihilation.
The fall of the USSR chopped the legs out from under these stories. Nobody is worried about Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan unleashing global thermonuclear war. That scare tactic just doesn't work. Even back in the 60s a lot of that paranoia was the result of internal propaganda.
The world doesn't have enough nuclear weapons for "total nuclear annihilation".
To end all humans with the weapons directly? Indeed not.
To break all logistics chains, ending most industrial output, reducing carrying capacity back to the pre-industrial age? That I think is still doable.
Perhaps not, but there's no functional difference to the millions (hundreds of millions even) of victims if you start hitting major population centres.
There's plenty enough to make the second-worst war in human history look like an enjoyable beach vacation by comparison.
You're not kidding. I read this in the late 70s, and it's a bit of a gut punch to revisit it now, on the very day of the story, in a world where smart homes are somewhat there and nuclear saber-rattling is once again the theme of the day.
Of course, writing about the future means you won't get everything right - especially once specific dates or years enter the picture and technologies are in use that haven't been invented (or invented and discarded) yet. Nobody predicted that World War III would last as long as it has, or be so full of utter stupidity. On the technological front, film projectors are relics in this era, and film-based storage never really caught on. On the other hand, videotape wasn't around in 1950, and even audio tape was a fairly new technology.
Well. This is the day. It looks like this poster from the Vietnam War era may have come to pass. [0]
[0]https://www.etsy.com/listing/1266371519/vintage-original-197...
Lucky for us.
this version seems to be missing large sections compared to the other posted version, like how the mice throughly clean up the debris after the dog's entrance, the dog smelling food through the kitchen door and scratching at it, etc etc
The original was published as a one page story. It was later reprinted in a longer format.
I imagined one of those automatic lawn mowers on a very sunny day, going about its own business cutting the grass. Until it arrived on the non-shielded side, and it kinda sags a bit and keels over into the black-charred ground on that side. A clean shadow between the un-touched grass, and the ground in directly in the path of the blast. Or maybe the charred ground is for later. We need to see the nice, automated kitchen first. And only then the rest of the world. Would be a very interesting short film, I think.
I thought this might have been the one about the lush (but dangerous!) Venusian rainforest!
(In Bradbury's time, we knew Venus was covered in thick clouds, and could only speculate about what might be beneath the clouds. Clouds = rain = lush vegetation?)
Same, seeing the title and having not read Bradbury for a long time I was thinking either The Veldt or that one (The Long Rain). I did remember it on reading, though, and it's an unsettling feeling.
Today is August 4, 2026
That dog scene wrecked me. Last living thing in the house, and the system just cleans it up like it’s another mess. No mourning, no pause. Just efficiency.
I wonder if the latest Jurassic Park: Rebirth film drew from this?
There is a reference to global warming that is similar to the poem. That the world will heat up, and humanity will die, and the earth will continue on as it has for a million years. The film mentioned the “the earth will shake us off, like a summer cold”.
This seems fairly comparable to the soft rains poem in this piece.
Oh, this just popped into my head. If you want an early piece about global warming, I submit Metropolitan Nightmare:
Earth overcoming the sickness that is homo sapiens is a long-standing meme. The ideas that species can become extinct (Cuvier) and that humans are hurting the planet (Humboldt) have existed since around 1800.
"shake us off" sounds more like George Carlin:
> We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
I read Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky recently and I think it takes more-or-less takes direct inspiration from this story (and the poem) with modern aesthetics. I liked it, it’s more dark-humorous than strictly bleak, but still pretty bleak as you read between the lines.
It's interesting to look at the short a story and see where we are still behind on home automation. We still don't have robot firefighting or accurate robot cooking, for example.
The story of a smart home that can't tell when you're not home! :-)
The planets were meeting, and each one complained about something. Then Earth said: "I’ve got humans." The others said: "Don’t worry, that’s not permanent."
Though to be fair the very first version was set in 1985, then shortly afterwards 2026, and revised again to 2057.
No nuclear apocalypse yet.
Nice.
Maybe it happened while we were sleeping and this is just some radioactive psychedelic dream
For the fictional take on that see Ursula K. LeGuin's wonderful novel _The Lathe of Heaven_ --- the PBS movie version is unexpectedly quite good.
The day is young!
It happened the day before, since children were still playing. We are safe.
My impression was that it had happened several days to a few weeks prior. Enough time for the house through ordinary daily activity to largely exhaust its water reserves. Of course most of today's actual houses don't keep that much on hand, but it sounds like this one had a sizable store at one point.
It impressive how prescient the technology feels. I mean in 2020 I would have thought the fully automated kitchen and the voice that asks which poem one wants to hear as fanciful, now it's kinda tech demo level.
Can't wait for all the inductive backdoors that will appear today thanks to this, LOL!
I liked Ray Bradbury's thoughts on the internet when it first came into existence
He also had interesting ideas on shopping malls of all things, hoping that they could turn into places where people would socialize besides shopping and that they should have a maze-like layout so that people could get what he called "enjoyably lost" the way people can exploring cities. The since-closed Horton Plaza mall in San Diego had an odd layout and the architect even claimed inspiration from Bradbury for it.
I think the maze thing is a strategy that mall operators use to trap shoppers in them and encourage them to spend more.
I'm sure that's why mall owners like it but Bradbury was advocating it from the angle of discovering cool alleys with little shops and restaurants like you can in an old chaotic city like Rome.
I spent years of my childhood in Horton Plaza, as well as Seaport Village, Mission Valley Center, and Fashion Valley.
I would say that we never felt “trapped” by Horton’s layout. There were plenty of clearly-marked exits around the perimeter. But the maze features were remarkable and unique for us.
There were bridge walkways with an incline of half a level. There were asymmetrical stairways. The perimeter of stores was not square. There were many levels and elevators. There were no particular “anchor stores” like the big department stores, although the multiplex theater was a focal point.
Elements that kept us inside included food and the aroma of food. Just thinking back to 1989 in Horton, I can practically smell the warm pretzels, cinnamon rolls, and candy stores. There were benches and places to sit. There were sculptures and bold colors and the Jessop’s Clock. Santa Claus and his elves every Christmas. We were in the heart of downtown, but crime was unheard-of and mall rats did not bother us. It was a place to walk around and share family experiences. Perhaps we were the mall rats.
"Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn."
Bradbury describes the fully automated smart home, but its technology does obviously not extend into the garden exterior. Funny - that in reality robot vacuum cleaners and robot mowers were actually among the first gadgets in automated smart homes.
I perceive this as a flaw in the story. The author had a very prophetic vision of technology in the future, and with the silhouettes on the wall he produced a strong emotional image, but he didn't realize the contradiction.
Except, of course, if he envisioned manual lawn mowing as a future leisure activity!
> Bradbury describes the fully automated smart home, but its technology does obviously not extend into the garden exterior.
In the 7th to last paragraph, second sentence, he lists the automated processes still going, including "cutting the lawn by remote-control mower".
People still cook in houses with microwaves and wash dishes despite owning dishwashers
Cooking is pretty different to lawn mowing here, you still can't replicate the output of a cooked meal with any easily available combination of home appliances and robotics (let alone just microwaves). I think a large chunk of people would probably stop cooking if that was possible.
Well I enjoy mowing my lawn (with a mechanic mower of course). Anything but the office chair and monitor.
Yeah. All they needed back then was a healthy dose of some of those new chemical fertilizer/herbicides to broadcast onto their monoculture non-native grass lawns. They could look forward to the smell of fresh-cut grass while they enjoyed snorting the exhaust from their leaded gasoline lawnmowers and edgers. They could have the nicest, greenest lawn on the block and be the envy of all their neighbors.
Later on, like their neighbors, they can stumble thru the last years of their lives with Parkinsons or other chemically-induced afflictions or just slowly waste away with internal cancers while their lead-addled offspring elect criminal pedophiles and imbeciles to lead the whole country - backwards.
Man, I need to go to sleep. I do agree with your analysis though.
Growing up, I hated this guy. Boring! Now, I can recognize writing talent.
Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said,
over and over, “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is …”
Reminiscent of his other short stories from the Martian Chronicles, also rife with apocalyptic themes
First time I have seen a parental rating in a blog post.
"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 fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.
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."
- Sara Teasdale, 1918
Didn't see the inspiration for Bradbury mentioned here. I love this poem. There's also a great song-rendition of it by The Three D's, a folk group popular in the 50's.
Nice imagery, but feels like a bit of a put down of humanity. Humans are also nature, let's not leave ourselves out.
It is really an anti-war poem rather than anti-humanity or about nature in general. Sara Teasdale was forced to write her sentiments obliquely. From Wikipedia:
> "The Sedition Act of 1918 enacted two months before the original publication of "There Will Come Soft Rains" made it a criminal offense to "willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States" and forced Teasdale to express her opposition to World War I "obliquely" in what might appear to be a pastoral poem."
If you think about it, Bradbury's story is also anti-war.
If you read the Influences section just under section you quoted from Wikipedia, it seems she was under the influence of the idea of an 'uncaring universe' from reading Darwin.
And yet there are humans that treat animals well (e.g. dogs, cats, crows and so on... ) These animals would feel the loss if humans disappeared. So i don't think it's right to say that nature (animals) wouldn't care and that the sentiment is a bit of implied put down of animals capacity for emotion and caring. Animals can care about their own and across species. Humanity would do well to feel less disjoint and separate from other humans and animals. That alone would reduce conflict a great amount and highlight the good that can be done between humans and animals.
As you probably noticed, I'm not fond of making a big distinction between humans and animals or nature. Hope that gives another perspective, and yeah, she probably was against the war and upset about the way humans were behaving at the time.
Thanks for the reply. I agree with you that humans are animals and also part of nature. I don't think there's an implied put down of animals or nature in the poem. I think the author was talking about how meaningless and tragic human endeavors are, such as war, when framed against the rest of nature. While (some) animals would briefly miss us -- and yes, some would struggle to live without mankind, having become dependent on us -- this would be brief, and nature would continue without us.
My all time favourite writer. No sci-fi writer could describe the launch of a rocket any more poetic than Ray Bradbury.
I'm glad our homes aren't shrieking at us at all hours.
Amazing story, though.
"I'm glad our homes aren't shrieking at us at all hours."
We have phones to do that for us.
I had to replace a fire alarm last week, so sometimes they do shriek at us at all hours!
So...we're doing better than expected!
So is The Pedestrian...
> So is The Pedestrian...
It's set in November, not August, and another 27 years further in the future (at least the version currently linked to on the front page).
Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.
As far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.
Or perhaps the comment you were responding to was asserting "knowing" or "caring" is not something Nature can do.
The comment was paraphrasing the message of the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" (which Bradbury used for the title of his story), which is exactly about this: that Nature won't know or care when we're gone.
"Humanity" is far from "all the life on Earth". Nature will be better off once it happens.
I see this a lot, and I think it's sort of naive. Nature itself is doomed due to the way the universe works. It's also far more brutal and arbitrary than we could imagine being. The only way to even have a chance at avoiding the doom that "nature" is facing is for something to evolve that can manipulate and forestall this inevitability.
I don't know if humanity is what can do that, and likely nobody knows. But nature is not going to survive either once you broaden the time horizon a bit.
> Nature will be better off once it happens.
As long as "it" happens before we poison or otherwise harm our planet beyond some "tipping point" after which Earth becomes "inhospitable" to most/all "complex" life in general.
> Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.
You got downvoted for paraphrasing the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains", from which Bradbury took the title of his story.
I supposed that's to be expected online. Small consolation, but at least some of us understood you :)
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
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.Thanks. Glad at least a few people understood. I pulled out my copy of Martian Chronicles today (which I'm fortunate to have signed by Bradbury) when I saw this pop up on the main page.
It's common for spammers to use an LLM to post a short summary of a thing in the thing's comments, to attract upvotes.
Fair, but even though I don't comment often, my account is almost 15 years old. So I'd hope that at least pushes back against the spammer aspect - but ultimately, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh! I didn't even think it could be a spambot. You may be right :(
I'm not a spambot - it just felt sort of poignant for today. Ultimately, doesn't bother me that it got downvoted. Created some discussion, I got maybe mistaken for a bot - so all good ;).
Ray Bradbury has some great ideas, but I hate his writing style. It’s far too flowery, he’s on a spectrum that contains Hemingway at one extreme, and Bradbury near the other.
I prefer Hemingway. Writing style at least.
This is such a surprising comment! Bradbury's style is very sparse and plain, and much closer to Hemingway's end of the spectrum than to the other. Where would you put, say, Nabokov, Melville, or Lovecraft?
Haven’t read Nabokov, but Lovecraft is on the Bradbury end of the spectrum, but I love Lovecraft lol
To each his own, I suppose.
I particularly like Bradbury's style. It reads very prose poetic. One of my favourite is Dandelion Wine, which you will probably hate.
As "Forever and the Earth" shows it wasn't just stylistic, but essential.
Ecclesiastes 1:1~11 (where that title is from) talks about futility, using only verses that are hopeful. (but that is lost on newer translations because the language was simplified. see legacy standard or Brenton's Septuagint for the effect)
Interestingly, I had the exact opposite reaction - I enjoyed the writing itself, but didn't find the premise all that interesting.
My friend, we exist at opposite ends of a spectrum ha
Honestly I'm just tired of the doom and gloom. I should probably keep in mind this was written in 1950.
Try some Arthur C Clarke, less doom and gloom
Childhood's End by Clarke is quite high on my list of grim endings for the human race
his magnum opus Explode Eath and most of humanity, because of bureocracy apathy, in the first 10 pages. ...Oh I see now. nvm.
I love Ray Bradbury. My favorite short story author.
More books and stories are listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_holocaust_fict... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apocalyptic_and_post-a...
The Beast of Heaven by Victor Kelleher is very relevant to current affairs. Two AIs guard a nuclear weapon in endless discussions, drawing heavily from Milton's Paradise Lost and the bible.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2333226.The_Beast_of_Hea..., borrowable at https://archive.org/details/beastofheaven0000kell/page/2/mod...
https://wnyc.org/story/bradbury-centennial-with-neil-gaiman
Yetide Badaki's marvelous reading begins at 3:50
OT: Selected Shorts is wonderful.
My one complaint: it's rarely revealed when a story was published, and it took me far, far, far too long to realise that many of my favourites were many decades old.
That said, hearing a story read and acted by a skilled player is its own joy. I'm a good reader, but I'm not that level of good, and a few decades of listening to Shorts has improved my own inner-reading voice.
Available as a podcast, though the back-catalogue is parlous brief, largely due to copyright, I suspect. Still worth following.
With the right podcatcher* settings the back-catalogue issue goes away. It's still annoying when you want to share a particularly moving story with friends.
*) Overcast user here: "Smart Speed has saved you 419 hours beyond speed adjustments alone"
"water, gas and light bills"
I assume light bills refers to electricity, as, especially pre war, that's what electricity was predominantly used for?
The original download link's file having "...(1).pdf" in the name got me looking for a duplicate download for longer than I'd like to admit.
Mandatory link: the Zarelli soundtrack, using Leonard Nimoy's reading.
https://open.spotify.com/track/0DflgiMYRQP3UXtZ47NBus?si=XGR...
Zarelli - Falling Light ft. Leonard Nimoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ekjpJWSvY
Fun to witness all the things it got right, which we can now remark wasn't close at all. The dystopian robotic future exists somewhere in a Chinese factory if anywhere at all.
Yeesh how bleak
It was published 5 years after World War II was ended via the first ever nuclear warfare. The silhouettes on the house wall are a clear allusion to the shadows of people left on buildings in Hiroshima. The bleakness was a warning and reminder of what was at stake at the time.
if you find this to be bleak, don't read his "The Small Assassin", or much of anything in The October Country.
It's nothing particularly special in that regard, there's plenty of apocalyptic fiction that came out of the nuclear arms race. What's really bleak is that the story's depiction has been a real possibility for longer than most of us have been alive, and pretty much nobody cares to do anything about it. It's to the point where people talk about the threat of sudden nuclear annihilation as something relegated to the past, when it never went away.
One of my favorites of Bradbury’s.
Haunting.
So, uh, how did this random site get the rights to republish Bradbury? Or, to judge by their front page, did they mistake Bradbury's works for public domain?
And nobody asinine enough to ask "where's my jetpack" because we'd need Von Neumann self replicating machines, a supply chain and significantly more robust coding to get there.
He might have done better to push it another 50 years. Problem being the other half of the MAD deal.
Not that the future isn't bleak, but I take heart we didn't all die in a massive thermonuclear war this timeline in the multiverse.
A speedy thermonuclear demise would have been better than this mess. Emphasis on speedy.
It's 2026. I'm still waiting for my martini to manifest. Thanks tech bros.
Earlier this year...
There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847297 - Feb 2026 (52 comments)
(I’ve turned off duplicate detection due to the significance of the date.)
Yes, I set a calendar notification then.
Don't mind the dup, though.
After the apocalypse, this story will appear every August on HN, even though there’s no-one left to read it. But there will, somehow, still be complaints about the dup.
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