There Will Come Soft Rains (short story)

"There Will Come Soft Rains"
Short story by Ray Bradbury
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)Science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction
Publication
Published inCollier's Weekly
Publication typePeriodical
Media typePrint magazine
Publication dateMay 6, 1950 (issue date)
Chronology
 
April 2057: The Long Years
 
October 2057: The Million-Year Picnic

"There Will Come Soft Rains" is a science fiction short story by author Ray Bradbury written as a chronicle about a lone house that stands intact in a Californian city that has otherwise been obliterated by a nuclear bomb, and then is destroyed in a fire caused by a windstorm. The title is from a 1918 poem of the same name by Sara Teasdale that was published during World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic. The story was first published in 1950 in two different versions in two separate publications, a one-page short story in Collier's magazine and a chapter of the fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles.

The author regarded it as "the one story that represents the essence of Ray Bradbury".[1] Bradbury's foresight in recognizing the potential for the complete self-destruction of humans by nuclear war in the work was recognized by the Pulitzer Prize Board in conjunction with awarding a Special Citation in 2007 that noted, "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."[2] The author considered the short story as the only one in The Martian Chronicles to be a work of science fiction.[3]

  1. ^ Bradbury, Ray (1980-11-25). "Ray Bradbury: The Science of Science Fiction". Christian Science Monitor (Interview). Interviewed by Arthur Unger. Retrieved 2020-09-06.
  2. ^ Murphy, Sean. "Spotlight: Ray Bradbury". Pulitzer Prize Board. Retrieved 2020-09-06.
  3. ^ Bradbury, Ray (1997). "Green Town, Somewhere on Mars; Mars, Somewhere in Egypt". The Martian Chronicles (Epub ed.). HarperCollins Publishers Inc. (published 2013). ISBN 9780062242266.