“The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down.”
I’m a big believer in the idea that science fiction is made for the short story form, and the short story form is made for science fiction. The short story gives sci-fi the space it needs to develop a concept without allowing so much time that the concept begins to wear thin. The best examples stay with you, occurring to you now and again with a frequency disproportionate to their length. ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury, is a particularly nice example.
The premise is simple enough. Far in the future, what we would now call a ‘smart-house’ (albeit one which runs on “memory tapes” rather than digital information in a nice example of zeerust) continues its automatic functions like making breakfast, running baths, and putting on video projections to entertain the children, despite the fact that it seems to be entirely empty. We learn, with brutal simplicity, that there has been some sort of explosion which has killed the family who lived there, leaving only their silhouettes outlined in the paint of the house’s walls as evidence they ever existed at all.
The story is effective in large part because of its poignancy. There’s something plaintive about the house as it continues to work through its endless and repetitive list of tasks and, when a sudden house fire starts, it feels to the reader almost like reading a description of the burning of a living thing. The house screams, it tries “to save itself”, but to no avail. In the end all that is left is a single wall repeating the date over and over and over again. The house’s pointless and repetitive life and death mirrors our own as it speaks to nobody, performs tasks for ungrateful ghosts, and eventually dies in obscurity.
Throughout, Bradbury resists the urge to give the reader too much background for his scenario. In this case, it makes the reader feel like an explorer finding the empty world too late to avert the disaster. A wonderful story.
First published in Collier’s Weekly, May 1950. Collected in The Martian Chronicles, Doubleday, 1950
A Personal Anthology 