52 pages • 1 hour read
Ray BradburyThere Will Come Soft Rains
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Literary Context: The Collier’s Magazine Edition
Bradbury was a prolific writer of speculative fiction, incorporating elements of science fiction and dystopian fiction into his work. Among his other notable works is Fahrenheit 451, a novel set in a dystopian future in which books are outlawed and burned. He is also known for his short story collections.
“There Will Come Soft Rains” was published in the May 1950 edition of Collier’s Magazine. It appeared in a revised version in Bradbury’s novel The Martian Chronicles. The Martian Chronicles is an early example of the “novel in stories” or the “fix-up” novel. The chapters of these novels are individual short stories that share some commonality, giving them a novel-like structure. Authors like Bradbury often published the chapters of such novels first as short stories before collating them as novel chapters.
Although this guide focuses on the version of the story that appears in The Martian Chronicles, there are several differences between the two versions. The Collier’s version contains a short passage at the beginning of the story describing the lives of the house’s inhabitants before the explosion that incinerated their city. The married couple and their two children lived contently among domestic comforts such as “books that talked” (34) and “beds that warmed and made themselves” (34).
Historical Context: The Atomic Age
The story was published five years after the United States detonated the first atomic weapons, destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atom bomb, with its horrifying potential, occupied a prominent place in the minds of authors and readers across the world. Not only was the United States continuing to produce nuclear weapons, but it entered a nuclear arms race with the USSR. In response, the United States began to develop hydrogen bombs, which possessed a destructive capacity far beyond that of the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The advent of the atomic bomb and the impact of modern warfare serve as clear inspirations for “There Will Come Soft Rains.” The level of destruction resulting from the nuclear detonations in the two Japanese cities was unlike anything the world had seen. Readers in 1950 would have recognized the story’s implication of nuclear apocalypse from cues such as the city’s radioactive glow, charred wrecks where buildings had been, and even silhouettes of people who had been incinerated.
It is difficult to overstate how prominent atomic weapons were in the popular imagination. As nuclear weapons proliferated, there was a possibility that civilization could be destroyed in a nuclear war. This possibility seemed even more likely due to hostile relations between the first two nuclear-armed countries, the United States and the USSR. Bradbury’s was an early example of a story concerned with the ramifications of nuclear warfare, but many more would be published.
Another historical development was the introduction of household technologies, some of which likely inspired the technology found in Bradbury’s house. In the postwar economic boom, Americans had more disposable income to spend on appliances that made life more convenient or enjoyable. Both televisions and vacuum cleaners became far more common in American homes during the postwar period.
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