There Will Come Soft Rains By Ray Bradbury

In the mid 20th century Ray Bradbury was predicting and warning the world what effects rapid technological advancement would have on humanity in the next century and beyond. Bradbury saw the growth of technology being implemented into every aspect of our lives, it took away from the beauty of the world and replaced it with a dependance and dedication to technology. These elements are shown throughout “There Will Come Soft Rains,” with the family mentioned in the story leaving all the care taking and entertaining to the artificially intelligent house. The A.I house is also shown to be the only sentient being in the short story because the family members who used to live there and most of nature was killed because they were caught in the nuclear

The house provides all that humans would need from the outside world, rendering nature useless and obsolete to the AI. We see mentioned that the house has reserves of all kinds and its true scale is shown in the house’s final moments, “the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips” (Bradbury 5). The house is shown to have weeks of food on standby meaning the family never needs to step foot outside for food, water, or any other necessitates other than the forms found inside the house. Not only does Bradbury use the house as a symbol of technology attempting to dominate nature and humanity, but it shows its steps to fully eliminate it. Such as the children's room becoming fully surreal, “Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched grass, mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes and water holes. It was the children's hour.” (Bradbury 3). This elimination of nature and the outside world stands true to the common messages found in Bradbury’s dystopian stories, with technology either replacing or riding humanity of experiencing the true outside world. To many critics who refer to Bradbury as an extremist regarding his distrust in technology, the advancements spoken of in “There Will Come Soft Rains” appear to be a golden age for technology and wonderous for the common man. Many critics of the time cited him as uncreative and too extremist for a cause, his creativity may remain debated but “His importance and influence have been distorted by critics who never foresaw our present paradigm” (Kahan). Many critics of Bradbury were simply living in the present and unable to see how accurately Bradbury’s works of how technology would take control of our lives and eliminate the need/want for the outside world became