There Will Come Soft Rains

The specter of nuclear annihilation dominates the story, but the narrative is about an automated house and its battle with nature. The fate of the house suggests a central theme of the text: humans try to master nature with technology, but nature will win in the end. This theme is revealed through the text’s central conflict between the natural world and the remnants of human technology. This conflict—technology against nature—diverges from more common conflict structures such as “human against technology” or “human against nature.”

Though the main conflict is between two nonhuman entities, “There Will Come Soft Rains” has hints of more common literary conflicts. Humanity has become a victim of its technological progress (human against technology) through a nuclear war that took place at some point before the story begins. Likewise, the story suggests an implicit conflict of human against nature in which the high-tech house acts as a final representation of humanity holding out against the hostile elements of nature.

However, humanity is no more than a ghost lurking in the background. Without any living humans in the story, the house and nature act as the text’s main characters. The house with its automated processes engages in a literal conflict with the forces of nature, and the narrator describes this conflict as if it were a fight between two people. The narrative gives both the house and nature a sense of agency, or the ability to make decisions and act.

When the house catches fire at the climax of the story, the narrator says the house “tried to save itself” (253), but the fire is too “clever” (254). Here, Bradbury uses personification to create characters despite the absence of humans. The robotic inhabitants of the house act “frantically” (255), with a sense of “maniac confusion” (255). The voice reading poetry, on the other hand, continued to do so “with sublime disregard for the situation” (255). Each of these descriptors suggests that the house and its robots possess something like human thoughts and emotions.

Meanwhile, the narrator suggests the “clever” fire possesses the ability to make decisions. When the “blind robot faces” of the fire extinguishers appear from the attic (254), they fail because the fire had “sent flames outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there” (254). The battle between technology and nature is carried out with conscious effort by both participants. Indeed, the battle between the fire and the extinguisher pumps from the attic ends when the fire destroys “the attic brain which directed the pumps” (254). The narrator presents the fire and the resultant destruction of the house not as a series of natural events, but as a battle between two conscious, intelligent entities.  

Though humans are not present in the story, the technology they leave behind acts as a proxy for “man” in the battle against nature. The house is described as an “altar with ten thousand attendants” (249) serving humans who are gone. The house acts as a last outpost of human agency. It is a final, automated extension of human will in the world. Scientific progress may have killed humanity, but the domestic technologies of the house represent humans’ desire to create order.

Though the atomic bomb may be the more immediate threat, the story implicitly critiques domestic forms of technology. The relationship between technology and nature is one of control. The house and its robotic inhabitants are obsessed with keeping nature out. The house “quivered at each sound” (249) made by the natural world outside it. It raises its defenses against passing animals like foxes, cats, and even sparrows “in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on mechanical paranoia” (249). The house makes itself ironclad against not only animals but all traces of nature. The narrator describes how the mechanical cleaning rats would dart forth from the walls if so much as a “leaf fragment blew under the door” (250).

Technology, as seen in the house’s obsession over maintaining its cleanliness, acts as a stand-in for the human desire to impose order. The conclusion suggests that attempts to impose such order are doomed. The fate of the house is ironic given its method of dealing with traces of the outside world. After gathering detritus from the natural world like leaf fragments and even dust, the cleaning rats drop them into an “incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner” (250).

The house uses controlled fire to fight its battle with nature. This detail creates an ironic contrast when the house burns down. Fire, though long used as a tool by humans, is one feature of the natural world that continues to resist the order humans impose on it. The house is destroyed by its preferred weapon. The comparison of the house’s incinerator to an evil pagan god is notable, especially when contrasted with the positive words like “clever” (254) that are later used to describe the fire that destroys the house.

Another example of the house’s obsession with order is its incessant announcements related to time. With humanity gone, the date and time mean nothing. Nonetheless, the “voice-clocks” continue to keep meticulous track of the date, announcing what the human inhabitants of the house should be doing at any given time. This obsession with time-tracking and activity planning adds to the association between technology and control. The last line of the novel, in which a malfunctioning voice-clock repeats the date “over and over again” highlights the inevitable breakdown of this control (255).

The central theme of the text plays out as a battle between technology and nature. Technology, in turn, represents the order imposed by humans. Humans may be gone, but their obsession with control remains in the day-to-day activities of the house. For audiences in the 1950s, the domestic activities of the household robots in “There Will Come Soft Rains” invoke a distant future of almost unimaginable technological advancement. Nature, on the other hand, represents chaos. Despite this level of advancement, nature defeats human attempts to impose order on it through technology.