There Will Come Soft Rains (short story) Book Review

There Will Come Soft Rains (short story) by Ray Bradbury, published by the Collier in 1950.

This is a fantastic sci-fi short story, set in the future. It is named after and based on Sara Teasdale’s poem, There Will Come Soft Rains. It is set in past tense, and is written in third person perspective. It tells the sad story of a single house, left standing after a radio-active disaster. It starts in the morning and leads through the whole day, describing the house’s programmed routine. It describes a very tragic scene, where the family’s silhouettes can still be seen against the wall of the house, white against the ash covered wall. I felt a very strong sadness and pity for the house, as it is described to have feelings and went crazy over the loss of its inhabitants. It describes how it gave up on the outside world, closing all its shutters and doors and focussing only on keeping to the rituals of life before the accident. At one stage, the family’s dog appears at the door, half dead, before it goes insane. Its dead body is carefully cleaned up by the house and incinerated. The meaning behind the story is that mankind is destroying itself with technology, and that Nature will not notice the loss of humans. It really makes the reader think and analyse it. I liked this story, because even though it’s quite tragic, it successfully evokes emotion and describes meaningful, and vivid, images.