The house is depicted in this way because it represents both humanity and humanity’s failure to save itself. The house’s destruction is then framed as a death, and the description of its battle against the fire is replete with references to living things such as “mice” that spray water and “snakes” of flame-retardant chemicals.
The house burns because, despite its vigilance against intruders, a tree branch crashes through the kitchen window and knocks a bottle of cleaning solvent onto the oven. In this framework, the outcome in “Soft Rains” is perhaps best understood as an inevitable end to the worst aspects of humanity. Just as the house’s family did not wish to work hard at making their house a suitable home, world powers did not want to work out the problems among them. In a similar fashion, the nuclear weapons that decimated the surrounding landscape supplanted, by their use, human diplomacy. In “Soft Rains,” technology has supplanted diversion and art. Perhaps the most striking examples of this replacement are found in the house’s suggestions for entertainment-it produces bridge tables and reads poetry. The absence of the family shows how the automated house is an example of technology gone too far because it replaces the most human aspects of life. The house cooks meals, cleans messes, and wards off intruders-all for a family whose disintegration is memorialized by paint silhouettes on the house’s otherwise charred west face.
Bradbury, who is a proponent of space exploration and technological progress, satirizes these concept homes by showing their implications. The house is modeled after concept homes that showed society’s expectations of technological advancement. When considered on its own, “Soft Rains” is a warning. “Soft Rains,” in both its stand-alone and book chapter forms, is a commentary on the relationship between technological advance and societal change. The family who inhabited the house have died in a nuclear war, and the house is the only structure left in Allendale, California. “There Will Come Soft Rains” is the second-to-last chapter of the novel, and it depicts the destruction of an automated house by an accidental fire. The Martian Chronicles depicts the colonization of Mars by humans. Originally printed in Collier’s, “Soft Rains” was revised and incorporated as a chapter in Bradbury’s first and most acclaimed novel, The Martian Chronicles. Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” is the science fiction writer’s most widely anthologized short story. Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains
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