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schoen 3 hours ago [-]
I think an appreciable number of people upvoting this and reading it or re-reading it may not have noticed why it was submitted today (the date on which the story takes place is tomorrow!).
larodi 16 minutes ago [-]
It is now public domain ?
ghaff 2 hours ago [-]
I didn't get the link to the current date. But aside from the fact there was no Mars linkage probably my favorite Bradbury short.
duskwuff 1 hours ago [-]
> But aside from the fact there was no Mars linkage probably my favorite Bradbury short.
This story happens to describe events on Earth, but it's part of the same chronology as the rest of the Martian Chronicles stories. The story The Million-Year Picnic describes the same war from the perspective of a family who escaped to Mars.
As an aside, later editions of the book advanced all the dates by 31 years; those editions put this story in August 2057 instead.
SwtCyber 18 minutes ago [-]
The future arrived quietly
twotwotwo 2 hours ago [-]
Okay, a stretch for HN, but: singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada named an album released last year Vendrán Suaves Lluvias (meaning There Will Come Soft Rains). She talked about how she and her brother read The Martian Chronicles as kids and she remembered the Sara Teasdale poem quoted at the end. She said she composed the songs at a difficult time in her life and, I guess, something about that image in the story (and the poem in it) resonated then.
"Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn."
Bradbury describes the fully automated smart home, but its technology does obviously not extend into the garden exterior. Funny - that in reality robot vacuum cleaners and robot mowers were actually among the first gadgets in automated smart homes.
I perceive this as a flaw in the story. The author had a very prophetic vision of technology in the future, and with the silhouettes on the wall he produced a strong emotional image, but he didn't realize the contradiction.
Except, of course, if he envisioned manual lawn mowing as a future leisure activity!
deepsun 7 minutes ago [-]
Well I enjoy mowing my lawn (with a mechanic mower of course). Anything but the office chair and monitor.
SwtCyber 16 minutes ago [-]
People still cook in houses with microwaves and wash dishes despite owning dishwashers
ViscountPenguin 6 minutes ago [-]
Cooking is pretty different to lawn mowing here, you still can't replicate the output of a cooked meal with any easily available combination of home appliances and robotics (let alone just microwaves). I think a large chunk of people would probably stop cooking if that was possible.
doodlebugging 11 minutes ago [-]
Yeah. All they needed back then was a healthy dose of some of those new chemical fertilizer/herbicides to broadcast onto their monoculture non-native grass lawns. They could look forward to the smell of fresh-cut grass while they enjoyed snorting the exhaust from their leaded gasoline lawnmowers and edgers. They could have the nicest, greenest lawn on the block and be the envy of all their neighbors.
Later on, like their neighbors, they can stumble thru the last years of their lives with Parkinsons or other chemically-induced afflictions or just slowly waste away with internal cancers while their lead-addled offspring elect criminal pedophiles and imbeciles to lead the whole country - backwards.
Man, I need to go to sleep. I do agree with your analysis though.
philosopherNoob 4 hours ago [-]
Though it makes me mourn for life lost when I read it even now, I never cared much for “There Will Come Soft Rains”. It’s a story exploring how what we make could continue on without us (for a time). But “The Pedestrian” (1951) is included at the end. It’s the last two pages out of that six page PDF. I think that one’s more apt to modern life. I read that one ages ago and it unsettled me.
kombookcha 2 hours ago [-]
You know what, you're right - The Pedestrian hit me much harder this time around than the first time I read it.
God, I love Bradbury.
Terratrader 23 minutes ago [-]
My all time favourite writer. No sci-fi writer could describe the launch of a rocket any more poetic than Ray Bradbury.
SwtCyber 19 minutes ago [-]
Bradbury wrote rockets the way other writers wrote sunsets
I wonder if the latest Jurassic Park: Rebirth film drew from this?
There is a reference to global warming that is similar to the poem. That the world will heat up, and humanity will die, and the earth will continue on as it has for a million years. The film mentioned the “the earth will shake us off, like a summer cold”.
This seems fairly comparable to the soft rains poem in this piece.
myself248 3 hours ago [-]
"shake us off" sounds more like George Carlin:
> We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
water-data-dude 4 hours ago [-]
For most of my life it's felt like we've been moving away from this scenario, but lately it's felt like we're sliding back towards it
kibwen 4 hours ago [-]
The great sleight-of-hand of the 20th century is that it never went away, we all just collectively decided to stop thinking about the fact that at every given moment for the rest of human history we'll never be more than thirty minutes away from total nuclear annihilation.
andai 5 hours ago [-]
This story was adapted into a short animated film in 1987:
Bradbury was very popular in USSR. His Wikipedia page has an anecdote of a Soviet filmmaker recognizing him in a crowd and surprising the rest of the celebrities around who had no idea who Bradbury was. (Another such author would be Vonnegut.)
There was a Soviet publisher Kniga (Book) that published only books about other books: book art, technology, bibliophile stories and so on. One of their books was a collection of short stories whose main topic was books, reading, writing or similar. One of stories was Bradbury's "Forever and the Earth", translated, of course, but very well. I was a teenager then an I remember being deeply impressed by it. I knew Bradbury, of course, but mostly from sci-fi and he wasn't really a sci-fi author. (One of Soviet sci-fi writers pointed out that Bradbury was pretty much anti-scientific in his stance.) That story made Bradbury stand out for me.
pmg101 8 hours ago [-]
Today is August 4, 2026
HomeDeLaPot 5 hours ago [-]
The story of a smart home that can't tell when you're not home! :-)
backpackviolet 3 hours ago [-]
I read Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky recently and I think it takes more-or-less takes direct inspiration from this story (and the poem) with modern aesthetics. I liked it, it’s more dark-humorous than strictly bleak, but still pretty bleak as you read between the lines.
purple-leafy 5 hours ago [-]
Ray Bradbury has some great ideas, but I hate his writing style. It’s far too flowery, he’s on a spectrum that contains Hemingway at one extreme, and Bradbury near the other.
I prefer Hemingway. Writing style at least.
svat 2 hours ago [-]
This is such a surprising comment! Bradbury's style is very sparse and plain, and much closer to Hemingway's end of the spectrum than to the other. Where would you put, say, Nabokov, Melville, or Lovecraft?
purple-leafy 2 hours ago [-]
Haven’t read Nabokov, but Lovecraft is on the Bradbury end of the spectrum, but I love Lovecraft lol
Mikhail_Edoshin 2 hours ago [-]
As "Forever and the Earth" shows it wasn't just stylistic, but essential.
squigz 5 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, I had the exact opposite reaction - I enjoyed the writing itself, but didn't find the premise all that interesting.
purple-leafy 5 hours ago [-]
My friend, we exist at opposite ends of a spectrum ha
squigz 5 hours ago [-]
Honestly I'm just tired of the doom and gloom. I should probably keep in mind this was written in 1950.
purple-leafy 4 hours ago [-]
Try some Arthur C Clarke, less doom and gloom
yyaakkqq 26 minutes ago [-]
his magnum opus Explode Eath and most of humanity, because of bureocracy apathy, in the first 10 pages. ...Oh I see now. nvm.
ggm 2 hours ago [-]
And nobody asinine enough to ask "where's my jetpack" because we'd need Von Neumann self replicating machines, a supply chain and significantly more robust coding to get there.
He might have done better to push it another 50 years. Problem being the other half of the MAD deal.
Not that the future isn't bleak, but I take heart we didn't all die in a massive thermonuclear war this timeline in the multiverse.
iririririr 51 minutes ago [-]
The original download link's file having "...(1).pdf" in the name got me looking for a duplicate download for longer than I'd like to admit.
My one complaint: it's rarely revealed when a story was published, and it took me far, far, far too long to realise that many of my favourites were many decades old.
That said, hearing a story read and acted by a skilled player is its own joy. I'm a good reader, but I'm not that level of good, and a few decades of listening to Shorts has improved my own inner-reading voice.
Available as a podcast, though the back-catalogue is parlous brief, largely due to copyright, I suspect. Still worth following.
MengerSponge 4 hours ago [-]
With the right podcatcher* settings the back-catalogue issue goes away. It's still annoying when you want to share a particularly moving story with friends.
*) Overcast user here: "Smart Speed has saved you 419 hours beyond speed adjustments alone"
MrBuddyCasino 4 hours ago [-]
Mandatory link: the Zarelli soundtrack, using Leonard Nimoy's reading.
This story happens to describe events on Earth, but it's part of the same chronology as the rest of the Martian Chronicles stories. The story The Million-Year Picnic describes the same war from the perspective of a family who escaped to Mars.
As an aside, later editions of the book advanced all the dates by 31 years; those editions put this story in August 2057 instead.
For anyone curious, there's a Tiny Desk Concert of songs from the album at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9PoZ0Vcb_s and an interview, in English, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcQbB7Dc83U
Bradbury describes the fully automated smart home, but its technology does obviously not extend into the garden exterior. Funny - that in reality robot vacuum cleaners and robot mowers were actually among the first gadgets in automated smart homes.
I perceive this as a flaw in the story. The author had a very prophetic vision of technology in the future, and with the silhouettes on the wall he produced a strong emotional image, but he didn't realize the contradiction.
Except, of course, if he envisioned manual lawn mowing as a future leisure activity!
Later on, like their neighbors, they can stumble thru the last years of their lives with Parkinsons or other chemically-induced afflictions or just slowly waste away with internal cancers while their lead-addled offspring elect criminal pedophiles and imbeciles to lead the whole country - backwards.
Man, I need to go to sleep. I do agree with your analysis though.
God, I love Bradbury.
Burgess Meredith Reads Ray Bradbury, 1962: https://dn720300.ca.archive.org/0/items/meredith-bradbury/01...
Edit: Ray Bradbury read by Leonard Nimoy, 1975 https://archive.org/download/bradbury-nimoy/1-There%20Will%2...
[0]https://www.etsy.com/listing/1266371519/vintage-original-197...
Lucky for us.
There is a reference to global warming that is similar to the poem. That the world will heat up, and humanity will die, and the earth will continue on as it has for a million years. The film mentioned the “the earth will shake us off, like a summer cold”.
This seems fairly comparable to the soft rains poem in this piece.
> We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc
(Russian, with subtitles.)
There was a Soviet publisher Kniga (Book) that published only books about other books: book art, technology, bibliophile stories and so on. One of their books was a collection of short stories whose main topic was books, reading, writing or similar. One of stories was Bradbury's "Forever and the Earth", translated, of course, but very well. I was a teenager then an I remember being deeply impressed by it. I knew Bradbury, of course, but mostly from sci-fi and he wasn't really a sci-fi author. (One of Soviet sci-fi writers pointed out that Bradbury was pretty much anti-scientific in his stance.) That story made Bradbury stand out for me.
I prefer Hemingway. Writing style at least.
He might have done better to push it another 50 years. Problem being the other half of the MAD deal.
Not that the future isn't bleak, but I take heart we didn't all die in a massive thermonuclear war this timeline in the multiverse.
Yetide Badaki's marvelous reading begins at 3:50
My one complaint: it's rarely revealed when a story was published, and it took me far, far, far too long to realise that many of my favourites were many decades old.
That said, hearing a story read and acted by a skilled player is its own joy. I'm a good reader, but I'm not that level of good, and a few decades of listening to Shorts has improved my own inner-reading voice.
Available as a podcast, though the back-catalogue is parlous brief, largely due to copyright, I suspect. Still worth following.
*) Overcast user here: "Smart Speed has saved you 419 hours beyond speed adjustments alone"
https://open.spotify.com/track/0DflgiMYRQP3UXtZ47NBus?si=XGR...
Haunting.
There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847297 - Feb 2026 (52 comments)
(I’ve turned off duplicate detection due to the significance of the date.)
Don't mind the dup, though.