Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains": a 1950 story set on 4 August 2026

Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains", published in 1950 and collected in The Martian Chronicles, unfolds on a single day: 4 August 2026, in Allendale, California. Now that the date has arrived, the text is circulating again as one of the sharpest early portraits of a fully automated home — and of what such a house does when its people are gone.

A house that keeps to its routine

The story opens with an empty house that runs exactly as programmed. A voice-clock wakes the household at seven; the kitchen stove produces eight slices of toast, eight eggs, sixteen strips of bacon and two coffees; a ceiling voice announces the date, a birthday, an anniversary and the bills to pay. Robot mice clean the floors, garden sprinklers water the lawn, the garage door opens for a car that never leaves. No one answers, because the city around the house is rubble and ash; on the west wall, five burnt silhouettes remain — a man mowing a lawn, a woman picking flowers, a boy, a ball, a girl.

A dog, a poem and a fire

A starving dog wanders in and dies in the parlour; the cleaning machines carry the body to the incinerator. In the evening the house asks Mrs. McClellan which poem she would like, and — getting no answer — reads Sara Teasdale's "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1918), the poem the story is named after, which ends with a spring that "would scarcely know that we were gone". At ten o'clock the house begins to die: a tree bough crashes through the kitchen window, a bottle of cleaning solvent shatters over the stove and ignites. The house fights back with water and jets of green chemical foam until a pump stops, the attic brain that drives the pumps is shattered, and the structure collapses. At dawn one wall is left standing, repeating: "Today is August 5, 2026..."

Why it is being shared again

Much of what Bradbury imagined — voice assistants that schedule the day, programmed cooking, floor-cleaning robots, automatic irrigation, a nursery that projects images — now reads like an inventory of consumer smart-home products. That overlap, together with the date in the text, is what has returned the story to circulation. The scanned PDF in question prints it alongside "The Pedestrian" (1951), a second Bradbury story about the last man who walks for pleasure in a city of 2053; the only remaining police car, which has no driver, stops him and takes him to the "Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies". The pairing gives a compact view of Bradbury's recurring concerns: the comforts of technology, and the society built around them.