There Will Come Soft Rains

There are no human characters in Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains. The story follows a single automated house going through its daily routine, making breakfast, cleaning, reading a poem aloud, after the family that lived in it, and apparently all of humanity, has been wiped out by nuclear war. The only trace of the people is a scorched silhouette burned into an exterior wall.

It’s among the most haunting short stories in American literature, and it shakes me more than most war novels ten times its length. It’s a lesson in everything a story can accomplish without a protagonist.

It first appeared in Collier’s in May 1950, the same month a revised version ran in The Martian Chronicles, and at roughly a dozen pages it’s the kind of compressed, perfect thing a writer can study in an afternoon and learn from for years.

Character without characters

The central craft achievement is making a story emotionally devastating with no people in it at all. The house is the protagonist, and Bradbury gives it just enough personality, dutiful, oblivious, tender in its automated routines, that we feel its tragedy as it goes on serving a family that no longer exists. The lesson is that emotional power doesn’t require a human character on the page; it requires something the reader can attach feeling to, and a sufficiently vivid object, faithfully rendered, will do it.

The house caring for the dead is more affecting than a survivor’s monologue could ever be. Most post-apocalyptic fiction piles on grim survivors and gets half the impact.

Watch: "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury (Full Audiobook w/ Text), Readman Reads

Implication over statement

The second lesson is the power of what is left unsaid.

Bradbury never describes the war, never explains the politics, never shows a death directly. He gives us the scorched silhouettes on the wall, a ball that rolls to a stop, a dog that comes home to die, and lets the reader assemble the horror themselves. The restraint is the power. By refusing to state the catastrophe, he makes the reader supply it, and what a reader imagines is always worse than what a writer describes.

Over-explaining is one of the dumbest habits in genre fiction, and this story is the cure: it shows how much more a story accomplishes by trusting the reader to connect the dots.

The lyricism, and the title

Bradbury’s prose is doing quiet work too. The story takes its title and its emotional climax from a Sara Teasdale poem the house recites, about nature continuing indifferently after humanity is gone, and the borrowed verse deepens the theme without Bradbury having to state it. The whole piece is a demonstration that a science fiction story can be lyrical, literary, and emotionally serious, that the genre is capacious enough for poetry. Snobs who dismiss science fiction as the literature of gadgets need this story shoved in front of them.

The structure rewards study as much as the prose. Bradbury organizes the story around a single day in the house’s automated schedule, marked by the voice that announces the time, seven o’clock, breakfast, eight-one, off to school and work. That ordinary domestic rhythm, continuing for no one, is what drives the horror, and using the mundane timetable as a structural spine is a brilliant choice.

The reader keeps waiting for someone to answer the house’s prompts, and the silence where a family should be grows heavier with each announced hour. By the time the day ends in the house’s destruction, the simple device of a schedule has driven the entire emotional arc. A writer can learn from how Bradbury borrows an everyday structure, the daily routine, and lets its familiarity make absence unbearable.

Is There Will Come Soft Rains worth reading?

It’s a small, perfect thing, and among the best short stories to study for any writer learning the form.

In a dozen pages it teaches character without characters, horror through implication, and the marriage of lyrical prose to a hard science-fictional premise. The single deduction is only that, being a short story instead of a book, it’s a complete lesson instead of a sustained one. Read it in one sitting, then read it again to see how every detail was placed.

It rewards the second look more than most novels reward the first, and I can’t think of a better dozen pages in the genre.

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