Turns out they can shoot water in case of fire. These mice do more than a robo-vacuum cleaner. In this new world, biological life is incompatible with tech-perfection. They get rid of anything natural right away. The scrawny dog brings a bit of nature into the house, which the personified robo-vacuum army of mice do not appreciate. If you ever find yourself the character of a story, never ever move into a house with huge swathes of glass. Houses made of glass are typically devoid of love and care. The walls of this house (at least, the nursery) are ‘made of glass’. See: Buildings As Characters In Fiction MANMADE SPACES What would you call a fictional, unidentifiable, ‘everywhere-nowhere’ region near where you live? ARENAĪ single dwelling, a house. For New Zealand, Havelock South, or something starting with ‘Wai-‘ (meaning ‘water’ in Te Reo.) New Zealand author Janet Frame made up Waimaru for her début novel, concatenating the Māori prefix with the real place of Oamaru. If I were creating a made-up place-name for Australia I might call it ‘Macquarie’ or ‘Murrumsturt’. Springfield, The SimpsonsĪllendale could be: Allendale Fremond, Allendale, Oakland, Allendale Solano, or some other Allendale. Like Springfield of The Simpsons, Bradbury picked a run-of-the-mill town name. Whereas the storyworld is fictional, the feeling of being ‘chased by the clock’ is very real to a 1950s reader (and beyond). Sleeping in is not an option when your existence relies upon being at work. 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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