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Earlier this year... 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.
This story was adapted into a short animated film in 1987: 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.
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.
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?
[0]https://www.etsy.com/listing/1266371519/vintage-original-197...
Lucky for us.
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.
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.
God, I love Bradbury.
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!).
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.
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.
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!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly I'm just tired of the doom and gloom. I should probably keep in mind this was written in 1950.
Try some Arthur C Clarke, less doom and gloom