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There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
461–469 of 469 posts
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#462It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction. In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon." In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must co…
> Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.
That's completely the wrong take. The toxic positivity you speak of is what will actually get the world destroyed, while the rest of us are working over years and decades to prevent and repair the damage that colonizer/rape culture inflicts upon humanity and the natural world.
I'm troubled that yours is the top comment, and that I'm seeing ostrich head in the sand sentiment spreading so widely among young people. Your bio says that you are a university professor. Is this really what you're teaching?
If I misinterpreted your comment, then please clarify.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. We are sleepwalking into WW III and no one seems to care.
We need to permanently retire the term "sleepwalking into war". When world leaders call for war, prepare for war, threaten war, and then cause as much war as they can, that's not sleepwalking.
"We" means us, the non-billionaires, the distracted by screens, the "it's too distressing to think about" class. We are sleepwalking. Always have been. Until our friends and family start falling, then, maybe, we'll take action.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Tiny Desk have the best sound engineers or what ?
They constantly blow my mind, especially with the more recent Napalm Death tiny desk concert.
okay wow. I have seen a lot of quieter bands on those, absolutely insane that they captured this. Funny blend of genre and space.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Annie Jacobsens research is at all accurate, she mentions that since the 60s they've run simulations constantly to project how a nuclear conflict would escalate, and in that time there's never been a simulation that resulted in an outcome other than complete and total global nuclear exchange. Even from a small scale tactical deployment, simulations always show it escalating to a full cataclysm. I personally don't…
If "complete and total global nuclear exchange" means "we shoot off all the nukes we've got", then how bad that is depends on how many nukes there are - not whether we shoot all of them or not. "Complete and total global nuclear exchange" is not so bad when there are 50 100Kt nukes, and is really, really bad when there are 10,000 10Mt nukes. And we've drastically reduced both the number of nuclear weapons and their a…
To be honest, even one major mass casualty event in a city from an exchange would be enough to tip the economy and cripple supply chains etc, and a limited/full exchange doesn't necessarily need to incinerate the whole world in order to completely collapse it
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your links do not substantiate your claim. There are quotes of Peter Hesgeth apparently expressing some pretty whacky beliefs, but not that particular one.
Hegseth is a crusader more than he's a bringer of Armageddon. Unfortunately, there are plenty of christian Zionists in the administration who do indeed want to bring about Armageddon. This other guardian article covers the topic much more thoroughly: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/...
> gaily decorated classrooms of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab
Interesting qualifier for anything Iran
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#467reminded me of this joke Tech enthusiasts: "Everything in my house is wired to the internet of things. I control it from my smartphone. My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I give it voice commands via Alexa, I love the future!" vs Programmers/Engineers: "I work in IT so my house has mechanical locks, mechanical windows, routers using OpenWRT, no smart home crap, no Alexa/Google assistants, no internet connected t…
You forgot the punchline: "the smartest thing in my house is a printer, and I keep a gun next to it in case it makes a funny noise."
I'd never trust a printer enough to leave a gun next to it. Especially if it's HP.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#468You shouldn’t use straight quotes in that font.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one of the usual failures of science fiction: most authors imagine technological progress, but don't also predict what societal changes it might bring. So this family had a quaint picture-book suburban 1950s life, just with robots. Same as Asimov's Detective Baley smoked a pipe and had a traditional 1950s marriage with a stay-at-home wife - just with robots...
> Same as Asimov's Detective Baley smoked a pipe and had a traditional 1950s marriage with a stay-at-home wife - just with robots.. How do you know that will not happen in the future? A hugely different society might look more like past than the present.
Vaping brought smoking back and pipe smoking is trending back upwards for the first time in decades. New bars where people can smoke cigars and pipes have shown up in my city again after a recent push to get a dedicated ABC license for that.
Trends are sometimes cyclical. (Not to be light about lung cancer being a trend, of course. I don't get why smoking is back. I'm just pointing out that it is back in the 2020s.)