This hyperawareness of time also hooks into the theme of capitalism, which started with the (imaginary, dead) human in bed woken up by a machine voice. It makes sense that we are hyper away of the time. As we all know, machines require specificity, and time is one example specificity. This short story is sub-headed all the way through with timestamps which take us through the course of a day, which is now run by machines. It didn’t help that the scientists themselves thought the experiments might end in fire. Many people, including Bradbury, weren’t too happy with these plans. Three months before this story was published, The USA announced that it was going to start working on a hydrogen bomb in response to the USSR’s atomic bomb. Bradbury was imagining a time when he knew he’d definitely be dead. The talking clock gives us a precise date: 4 August 2026, seventy-six years into the future. The Pulitzer Prize board said, “While time has (mostly) quelled the likelihood of total annihilation, Bradbury was a lone voice among his contemporaries in contemplating the potentialities of such horrors.” SETTING OF “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” PERIOD Some readers consider “There Will Come Soft Rains” the sequel to Bradbury’s “The Veldt”.Ĭolliers Magazine, where the story first appeared in May 1950, said “There Will Come Soft Rains” is ‘the one story that represents the essence of Ray Bradbury.’
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