This week we had to read August 2026: There will come soft rain and then watch the 10 min video that was based on the story. I thought this story was pretty good overall, it defiantly had that science fiction feel to it. I had to read the story twice because i didn’t realize that the story was so dark until i watched the video and then reread the story. I thought it was kind of funny at first, but then i realized that it was pretty dark.

The story is about a house that is run by a machine that does daily tasks like wake the people up, prepare breakfast and clean the house etc…. The story takes place after a bomb has dropped and everyone in the home has died and turned to ash, but the machine continues to  do its daily routine. For example one of the things it says is ” Eight-one, tick tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run , run, eight-one”.(pg1)  Another one is ” Nine fifteen, sang the clock time to clean”. (pg 1)  These are what made me feel like it was kind of nice, but then got the feel that it sounded like an evil dark Dr. Seuss. It also talks about what was left of the people after the bomb. He said ” The five spots of paint- the man, the woman, the children, the ball- remained. the rest was a thin char coaled layer.” (pg 1)  This is describing the imprints of the peoples body that was left after the bomb. The Story continues with a dog that survived but is very beaten up comes in the house and walks around and eventually dies. The machine continues to its daily routine throughout the story to where it reads a poem every night before bed  to the lady of the house Mrs. McClellan. Since she is ash and can’t respond the machine still doesn’t realize everyone is dead and puts it on random choosing the poem There will come soft rains. I like when things that stories are based on like the title are involved in someway so i thought that poem was nice to choose especially with the kind of state the world is in, which is basically ruins. Towards the end of the story a tree goes through the kitchen window and lands on the stove starting a fire that sets the house a blaze. There is a part were Ray Bradbury describes the fire he says “The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picasso and Matisse in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings. Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes.” (pg 3) I like how he describes the fire as almost a person sent on a mission to tear this house down. It made me feel like the fire was its own character. The fire eventually lead to an explosion that blew up the house leaving it like the rest of the world in ruins. The last sentence of the story is of the machine still doing its daily routine before it finally dies it says ” Today is August 5th, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is….” This shows that everything in this world will eventually die out weather it be animal, human or machine.

The video of There will come soft rains was pretty accurate to the story. However i felt the video was darker then the story really was, but it defiantly gave a really good visual interpretation of the story. In conclusion i think the story was a good read and it had a lot of different themes in it. Overall though tone was very dark and depressing.

This is a picture i found of the beginning of the story where the machine is making breakfast. This is what i thought the story and would look like bright and happy, but sill being as dark story.