‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury

Bradbury was my sister’s favourite author (and still is, I just asked her). I didn’t get him when I was a kid, and then when I was 13 my sister moved out and took all her books with her. I only started reading him again in the past couple of years. He’s an easy top 5 for me now too.

‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ takes place on August 4, 2026. An automated house stands alone in a neighbourhood that has otherwise been wiped out by a nuclear bomb. The house goes through its routine to take care, preparing meals and performing daily tasks for the absent family. It’s eerie and haunting.

The title echoes from a poem by Sara Teasdale, written 1918, in the aftermath of the Spanish Flu and the beginning of WWI:

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 one
Will 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.

First published 1950 in Collier’s, collected in The Martian Chronicles, Doubleday, 1950 and The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Everyman, 2010

‘Homecoming’ by Ray Bradbury

From the Dust Returned is, in a lot of ways, the book of my heart. I’ve written about my love for it before and probably will again after this, too. It’s a fix-up featuring some stories that Bradbury originally wrote to—get this—pair with illustrations by none other than Charles Addams, about a strange and wondrous family. That project fell apart but I find it very charming that the two men went on to create their own iterations of the idea. This particular story is the centerpiece of the book and I think it is also one of Bradbury’s very best, managing to capture the excitement and slight terror of being a child looking at the magical world of grown-ups. It’s a story that I’m always, in one way or another, writing towards.

First published in Mademoiselle, October 1946. Collected in From the Dust Returned, William Morrow, 2001

‘Zero Hour’ by Ray Bradbury

A bunch of kids are playing, because aren’t kids the cutest. They’re being very imaginative and talking to their ‘friend’ and nicking household items to build things. All very sweet, and told from the point of view of a distracted, rather distant mother. If anything, she’s delighted that the kids aren’t underfoot – even if they are playing ‘WWIII’. As with many of Bradbury’s twisted tales, by the time the people that shouldbe paying attention start to pay attention, it is too late, and terrible things are now underway.

This is a maddening, frustrating, provoking tale. It makes me want to yell at the page, and then hide under the bed. It was the source of a decade’s worth of nightmares as a child, and has stayed with me ever since.

First published in Planet Stories, Fall 1947. Collected in The Illustrated Man, Doubleday, 1951

‘The Dragon Danced at Midnight’ by Ray Bradbury

This is an absurd tale of Willis Hornbeck Jr, the operator of a film projector who, when drunk, mixes reels up to accidentally create acclaimed avant-garde cinema. The prose is also deeply funny and captures some truths about art, creativity and the inexplicable sources of genius.

“And there in the projection-room window above, a shadow loomed with wide-sprung eyes. The projectionist, bottle in numbed hand, gasped down upon our revelry”

First published with the title ‘The Year the Glop Monster Won the Golden Lion at Cannes’ in Cavalier, 1966. Collected in One More for the Road, William Morrow, 2002

‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury

“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

‘The Day it Rained Forever’ by Ray Bradbury

Ah, Ray Bradbury. Has there ever been a writer so capacious? You don’t finish Bradbury, you live within him. I’ve been reading him for decades, and I still come across stories I’ve never read before, or perhaps had forgotten reading. Wikipedia reckons he wrote 600 short stories, and 11 novels, some of which were ‘fix-up’ novels, stringing together short stories into a narrative whole. The stories run the gamut from those collected in The Martian Chronicles, as fine a set of colonial parables as I know, to those in From the Dust Returned, based on a family of ghouls and ghosts, who live in Illinois, and are called the Elliotts.

The story I’ve picked is ‘The Day It Rained Forever’, which gave its name to a collection of stories published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1959. It tells the tale of three old men living in a hotel in an America desert, waiting for the rain that always comes on January 29^th. But this year, the rain doesn’t come – something else does, driving a car and carrying a harp. It’s classic Bradbury – warm-hearted, human, off-to-the-left-of-things, and thrumming with mystery. It’s also full of quite beautiful lines and images, many of which would read like poems if they were to be laid out in the right way: “The rain fell on the rooftop and fell on hissing sand, it fell on rustling car and empty stable and dead cactus in the yard.” A sentence made all the more remarkable by the fact that he isn’t actually talking about rain.

The collection is dedicated to Rupert Hart-Davis himself. In a nice piece of symmetry Hart-Davis also published the collected tales of Henry James.

First published in Harper’s, July 1957, and collected in The Day It Rained Forever, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959; also in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Knopf, 1980; Everyman Library, 2010

‘A Sound of Thunder’ by Ray Bradbury

A classic in the science-fiction genre. A man called Eckles joins a time-travelling hunt to the late Cretaceous period where he is advised by the guide he can shoot a T-Rex, but to take care lest he affects history. During the expedition, the characters discuss the recent elections, and it seems their country has narrowly escaped a political catastrophe. On coming back to the year 2055 the hunters realise something has changed, a fascist is now President. Then Eckles discovers a crushed butterfly beneath his boot, potentially the cause of this disaster. There is horror in the idea that something could be inextricably altered in the past by a blundering boot, but a deeper threat is the nearness of the worse result in the present.

Ray Bradbury was perhaps the first proper science fiction I read, thanks to my uncle who donated his old books to me and my brother.

First published in Collier’s Magazine, 1952. Collected in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Knopf, 1980; Everyman Library, 2010

‘The Sound of Summer Running’ by Ray Bradbury

This is my coming-of-age story – not for the protagonist, who remains bursting with youthful innocence at the end, but for me. I raised myself on a diet of genre fiction during my early teens, devouring detectives and aliens. Purchasing a second-hand copy of Dandelion Wine, expecting carny ringmasters and living tattoos, and discovering instead that a tale doesn’t require a mystery waiting to be solved. Something as gossamer as capturing ‘that summer feeling’ can enthral.

‘The Sound of Summer Running’ places us inside the imagination of Douglas, a world where magic realism is not a necessity, since in his head he can run like a fox or a rabbit — as a fox or rabbit, he becomes the wind. The point of the story is not how he solves his dilemma in yearning for new running shoes. It’s to awaken again that feeling of childhood freedom, where one’s imagination placed no limits on the world.

I was barely older than Douglas when I first read it. A few years back, I found myself the probable age of the store-keeper, living on a small roadless island in Hong Kong, carting the weekly shop from the mainland over hills. The next day, my feet always throbbing, I conceded deck shoes were inadequate, regardless of my fashion sensibilities. In the mall, gently rocking back and forth in my first ever pair of trainers, Douglas’s words returned like a warm summer breeze…”Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes: LIKE MENTHOL ON YOUR FEET!”

First published, as ‘Summer in the Air’, in the Saturday Evening Post, February 18 1956; incorporated into Dandelion Wine, Doubleday, 1957. Picked by Julian Baker. Julian writes the Consume and Enjoy Substack every week, and has done other stuff in the past.

‘I Sing the Body Electric!’ by Ray Bradbury

I never knew any of my grandparents; the last died when I was eighteen months old. So this story hit me hard when I found it in a collection of his, probably one I browsed and bought in Belfast Waterstones, looking for ways out of my childhood Doctor Who obsession. We’re talking late eighties. Bradbury’s SF stuff is great, of course, but it’s the straight domestic pieces that have really stayed with me. Decades later, I can still feel the precise quality of shiver I got from stories of his I’ve never read since. This one is a vision of artificial unconditional love, maybe prefiguring what we’re finally getting close to now in AI. But I don’t think Bradbury’s is a cautionary tale; I remember it as a celebration. I might be wrong, though. I haven’t looked at it since my teens. No need. I know exactly how certain moments in that story make me feel, and how much they mean to me, so why would I want to go back? I’ve got it locked up inside.

First published in McCall’s Magazine, August 1969, under the title ‘The Beautiful One is Here’; adapted from his Twilight Zone screenplay, first broadcast 1962. First published under this title in the eponymous collection, 1969. Collected in Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1, HarperVoyager, 2012, and The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Everyman, 2010

‘The Veldt’ by Ray Bradbury

Do you remember when you were a child and you encountered, for the first time, a piece of art or writing that left you shaken? Not just moved, but a little disturbed. For me, that feeling was always coupled with secrecy, a belief that if my parents knew something had gotten under my skin it would cause them undue worry. The first time I remember feeling this was with (as any astute member of the literati might guess) A Goofy Movie. In the 1994 animated film, there’s scene where father and son face their own mortality as their raft veers toward a waterfall, and in the moments before their presumed death, they are left only with their love for one another and a bald and desire to survive. (Pretty goofy if you ask me!) I insisted on returning to see it in the cinema again and again, until something of that semi-shameful fixation had released its grip on me, and I probably got really into Polly Pocket or something.

The next time I felt that morbid fascination was after reading ‘The Veldt’. We’d been made to read Dandelion Wine in my middle school English class and it was so goddamn boring it became a bit of a family joke among us. My dad – a sci-fi obsessive – made it his mission to give us different, better Bradbury. Before I knew it there was a copy of The Illustrated Man in my hands, and in the collection’s opening story, ‘The Veldt’, children grow increasingly immersed in their home VR unit, which places them in a rendering of the African plains. The simulation becomes more and more real, until the story-perspective shifts – to the childrens’ parents – and, uh…yeah it gets pretty grim.

What felt stirring and secret to me wasn’t ‘The Veldt’s implied violence, but rather that an unhappy ending could enrich a story. And in early adulthood, when traumatising oneself with disturbing prose is sort of the name of the game (the time Less Than Zero ruined Christmas is a story for another time) I’m grateful for ‘The Veldt’ and Bradbury’s gentle ushering into the world of weird fiction.

First published as ‘The World the Children Made’ in The Saturday Evening Post, September 1950. Collected in The Illustrated Man, Doubleday, 1951 and widely anthologised, including in Collected Stories Volume 1, Harper Voyager, 2008, and The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Everyman, 2010

‘The Last Night of the World’ by Ray Bradbury

The last short story I read as part of my challenge that year was The Last Night of the World by the science-fiction legend Ray Bradbury (I’d highly recommend his book on writing, Zen and the Art of Writing). This story begins when a husband asks his wife, “What would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?” She asks if he’s means there’s a war coming, an atomic bomb, or germ warfare. Stirring his coffee, the man says: “But just, let’s say, the closing of a book.” He predicts that it’s the last night of the world because of an ominous dream, one his colleagues have also reported. There’s a calm, accepting attitude throughout, and the woman goes on to ask her husband if they “deserve” the end of the world. He assures her that it has nothing to do with “deserving.” After putting the kids to bed, the husband and wife spend their last night together in the most ordinary manner – washing dishes, playing a game. The man asks his wife if she thinks they’ve been “bad”, She says no, but they haven’t been “enormously good” either. She thinks that’s the root of the problem: “We haven’t been very much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of quite awful things.” In bed, they kiss each other. He says: “We’ve been good for each other, anyway.” The story forces its readers to reconsider an age-old question about how we choose to live our lives, about the inherent value of the ordinary moments – and sheds new light on what bravery and courage look like in the face of an inevitable ending.

First published in the February 1951 issue of Esquire and available to read here. Collected in Stories Volume 1, HarperVoyager, 1980

‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury

The title is from an anti-war poem by Sara Teasdale. The story is about a lone house that remains intact in a city obliterated by a nuclear bomb. There is no dialogue, other than the chilling automated pre-recorded devices within the house, giving the illusion that these objects are alive. The only things alive. The shock of the shadows of the family on the wall, frozen in time, is an eerie, emotionally annihilating, and starkly relevant, image.

First published in Collier’s Weekly, 1950, and collected in The Martian Chronicles, 1997

‘A Sound of Thunder’ by Ray Bradbury

‘It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior.’

Read it. Do the voices.

1952; available online here

‘Kaleidoscope’ by Ray Bradbury

A lot of my exposure to short stories comes through listening to readings or dramatizations on the radio, and my habit of falling under their thrall leads to many scorched shirts abandoned mid-ironing and dishes left unwashed in the sink. The BBC iPlayer Radio app portions its ‘Drama’ into particular (often baffling) genre categories, and generally my thumb slips to the ‘Horror/Supernatural’ and ‘Psychological’ labels. When the continuity announcer gave a quick precis for the day’s story and a rumbling, stern voice introduced itself (‘This is Ray Bradbury…’) I almost unplugged my headphones: I had decided I knew what ‘Sci-fi’ meant, was and could be, and that it could not possibly hold anything for me. I was an idiot, and soon an agog, reformed idiot with something in their eye.

Men are drifting in space. ‘They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.’ Their communication channels are still open, and they are able to talk for a short while as they spin further and further apart.

Original story, published 1951, adapted drama broadcast in 1991 which I believe you can hear here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjeiHRm8LNE