Name: There Will Come Soft Rains
Rating: 4.541666666666667 (24 reviews)
ISBN: 9780895989628

Ray Bradbury

There Will Come Soft Rains

Feels so apt that I took a break from "If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies" today, August 4, 2026, to read There Will Come Soft Rains. I wonder if Ray Bradbury is still with us; he'd find our entire situation with Superhuman AI funny, knowing he'd pick this particular date  that rogue AIs from two of the biggest companies escaped and are attacking other AI companies.

Nate

Stevie Locks

Tim Pendry

A post-nuclear tale published in 1950 that predicts the fully automated house still being promised us through the so-called Internet of Things. Today, we perhaps might hear Alexa's voice. The house lives on after the instant immolation of the inhabitants represented ultimately by the monument of their burned shadows on what will be the only part of the house to survive at the end of the story. Even the dog is dead. But the reason for reading it is the elegiac tone. Bradbury builds the story around a few lines of a poem written long before the possibility of nuclear war but predictive of the same reality that continues today at Chernobyl where trees still grow but humans don't live. He really lets himself flow into what turns into a sort of extended prose poem about mechanisms that act as ghosts of humanity, mindlessly following routines until accident and entropy no longer permit them to follow what had become daily rituals as the system collapses. The idea of technology surviving as the pale shadow of lost human life before it too is no longer able to function would have been sad enough nearly seventy years ago. Perhaps it is even sadder now when we contemplate the ghost lives that will survive us on the internet.

There Will Come Soft Rains

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