Summary Of Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains

The twentieth century has been characterized by the continuous progression of technological development. This was perhaps one of the defining features of the Cold War’s beginnings; the technological race that initiated during the 1950s was the byproduct of a bipolar competition for world domination. Most believe that technological innovation has been essential for the positive transformation of modern societies, but there are those who are wary of the negative effects that technology may produce on society and nature in the more general sense. Among them was Ray Bradbury, who in his short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” implicitly proposes that technology will bring about the destruction of both man and the world. Published in 1950, “There Will Come Soft Rains” reflects the period’s technological race, the widespread paranoia

It is noteworthy that the story opens presenting a fully automated house that is abandoned. There are no people in sight. The first sign of life is that of a sickly dog, which enters the house and dies. The evening comes and a poem describing humanity’s destruction is recited throughout the house by an artificial voice: “… 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 they were gone” (Bradbury 103). This is a telling passage, since it hints at the nothingness of humanity in the wider order of things. Human beings are but one of nature’s infinitely many components. The proposition is therefore that nature may go on living without caring about humanity’s absence. The irony, however, is that man’s destruction also implied the world’s destruction. This much is clear from the fact that the only natural life presented was that of the dog; it died shortly after entering the house and was carried away by tiny robotic