There Will Come Soft Rains

In 1950 Ray Bradbury wrote a short story called There Will Come Soft Rains. The story appears in a collection called The Martian Chronicles. The title comes from poem of the same title, written in 1918 as a response to the horrors of World War 1: There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;And frogs in the pools, singing at night,And wild plum trees in tremulous white,Robins will wear their feathery fire,Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;And not one will know of the war, not oneWill care at last when it is done.Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,If mankind perished utterly;And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,Would scarcely know that we were gone. by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) The Ray Bradbury story is set in the (then) distant future and describes, in a typically eery and unsettling way, the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. One house, in Allendale Carlifornia, fully automated to provide for the comfort…