Yeesh how bleak
if you find this to be bleak, don't read his "The Small Assassin", or much of anything in The October Country.
There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
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Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#22I 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!).
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#23This story was adapted into a short animated film in 1987: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc (Russian, with subtitles.)
Better quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quyaaszg6jc
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#24Dimension X, 1950: https://ia800901.us.archive.org/33/items/OTRR_Dimension_X_Si...
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...
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#25I 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.
"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.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#26I 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.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#27I 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!).
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.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#28Okay, 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.
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
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#29Ray 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.
As "Forever and the Earth" shows it wasn't just stylistic, but essential.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#30Ray 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.
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?