Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1954)

What:  Bradbury, Ray.  “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Collier’s, 1950.

Objective, third person narrator who is unnamed and may or may not be human.  Some possibilities include:  The house?  A surveillance system? A survivor? A “nanny cam”? A security system?  The robots?

Characters: four people: Mrs. McClellan, her husband and two children.  There is also a dog and nine thousand robot attendants.  A Mr. Featherstone is mentioned.  We don’t know who he is, but it is his birthday.  

Did the house live?  Did the house die?  Is the house destroyed?  

Is the house the narrator?  Why or why not?

Why are there robot mice?

Narration:  highly objective, precise, quantitative, all seeing, all knowing, stylistically the narration reads as some kind of report,

Diction: highly factual

Clocks: time, order, end of things, Doomsday Clock,

Elon Musk lives in a smart house.  

Why would the author or narrator have chosen the “interior of a clock shop at midnight” as an image for the last section of this story?  

Cogs are still in motion in a clock shop, despite being no one to attend to, clocks still function, clock shop would be loud at midnight (sounding alarms), “end of time/end  of times”, new beginning, midnight is when both hands overlap and it is simultaneously the beginning and end of a day.  

How do we define and organize time?

Is this story about time travel?

“Day Million” by Frederick Pohl

“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick

“Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” by Samuel Delany

“The Second Inquisition” by Joanna Russ

Compare/Contrast:  all of the stories we have read deal with the future of humanity; utopia/dystopia; utopic/dystopic

Humans can disappear, but time continues.  “There Will Come Soft Rains” is a story about time.  It is structured by time,

In what way is the Teasdale poem a metonym for the story?

Nature is ultimately more powerful than technologies in this story.  

Time is relative!

Technologies appear to improve with time.  But are also irrelevant without people to use them.  Technologies may breakdown.  They may also post-date humans.