OMG - Today is August 5th, 2026. Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles, "There Will Come Soft Rains." Written in 1950, the year after I was born. I read the story when I was in 10th grade, and it gave me the chills. I never forgot it. I had spent my school years having regular drills where we dove under our desks with our hands clasped over our heads, to protect us from a nuclear bomb. As if.
The year I read it was 1963.
The day President Kennedy was assassinated, school was dismissed early, and I walked home with a boy who lived nearby. Besides being devastated, we were both worried that Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the USSR, Russia, would take advantage of this moment of confusion to nuke America. To kill US.
I had just read the Martian Chronicles only a few days or weeks before. The short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains," is about a smart home of the future, where everything works automatically according to schedule, to give the family a stress free comfortable home life. The lights go on and off, the sprinklers water the lawn, the house is vacuumed. Gee. all the stuff we have now. Just as Bradbury predicted.
But nuclear war has come, and only one wall of that one home remains, surrounded by the burning rubble of the neighborhood, and as the sun rises, the alarm clock feature cheerfully announces to the ashes of the family, "Good morning! It is August 5th, 2026..."
[....]
The title is from a poem by Sara Teasdale:
"War Time"
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.
