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Worth noting - the original WW1 poem written by Sara Teasdale with the same name that may have inspired Bradbury:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(po...
The poem explicitly features in the story, so I'd say it's pretty guaranteed to have inspired Bradbury ;)
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The SSAATTBB setting of Teasdale's words by Latvian contemporary choral composer Ēriks Ešenvalds is fittingly powerful and a guaranteed source of chills:
The choir I sing in performed the piece for the first time in spring 2022, and against the backdrop of the pandemic and Russia's invasion the words felt incredibly topical and poignant. We're performing it again this spring.
While we're at it, a couple of other ethereally beautiful Ešenvalds settings of Teasdale's texts:
Only in Sleep – https://youtu.be/fvPynMI6Umc (for choir and a soprano soloist)
Stars – https://youtu.be/SK2Rd3qgIGE (for choir and tuned wine glasses!)
Beautiful. Sending the link to my Latvian relatives.
I made a composition for string orchestra and male voice from that poem 10 years ago. It's a very powerful poem.
https://soundcloud.com/henrisokka/there-will-come-soft-rains
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I’ll always upvote Bradbury; what a master. Isaac Asimov used to talk about “the big 3” of science fiction of his era: himself (natch), Arthur C Clarke, and Ray Bradbury. The more I read of all those cats, and boy have I read them, I came to see that Asimov was wrong, and that Bradbury was a different and better writer altogether.
Bradbury’s stories are about people, deeply real and deeply feeling people. This thread is young and already comments are about how Bradbury made folks feel. He was a humanist, like Ursula LeGuin, and less interested in exactly how the ray guns worked. Frank Herbert seems like this to me as well, very humane, opposite of Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson and (later stage) Neal Stephenson.
If you love Bradbury then take a look at Ian McDonald. When I read “Rainmaker Cometh” for the first time I had to do a double-take, so sure I was that it was a new Bradbury story.
Borges famously wrote a preface to a Spanish-language edition of "The martian chronicles". Excerpt:
"Ray Bradbury has preferred (unknowingly, perhaps, and by secret inspiration of his genius) an elegiac tone. Martians, who at the beginning of the book are horrible, deserve his pity when annihilation reaches them. Men vanquish and the author is not proud of their victory. He announces with sadness and disappointment the future expansion of mankind over the red planet - that his prophecy reveals as a desert of vague blue sand, with ruins of chess-like cities and yellow sunsets and ancient ships to wander on the sand.
Other authors stamp a coming date and we don't believe them, because we know it is a literary convention; Bradbury writes 2004 and we feel the gravitation, the fatigue, the vast and vague accumulation of the past - the 'dark backward and abysm of Time' from the Shakespeare verse. Already the Renaissance had noted, by mouth of Giordano Bruno and of Bacon, that the real Ancient Ones are us, and not the men from Genesis or Homer.
What has this man from Illinois done, I ask myself when closing the pages of his book, that episodes from the conquest of another planet fill me with horror and loneliness?
How can these fantasies touch me, and in such an intimate way? All literature (I dare reply) is symbolic; there are a few fundamental experiences and it is indifferent that a writer, to transmit them, recurs to the fantastic or the real, to Macbeth or to Rascolnikov, to the Belgium invasion in August 1914 or to an invasion of Mars. Who cares about the novel, or novelry of science fiction? In this book of ghostly appearance, Bradbury has placed his long empty Sundays, his American tedium, his loneliness, like Sinclair Lewis did on Main Street."
Strong second here. I’ve read lots and lots of all three.
Clarke wrote good stories. Asimov had some good ideas but was a fairly poor writer of fiction (his characters and dialog, in particular, are rarely better than terrible, and many of his stories hinge on a single gee-what-if shower thought and have little more going for them) and is in my estimation easily the weakest of the three.
Bradbury… is good good. He had a combo of talent and a mind to put it to a certain kind of use, some (or many) elements of which the other two did not possess. I would unhesitatingly recommend Bradbury to a literary fiction reader who’s not much on genre fiction for its own sake, and might not even bother to suggest where they start. I would selectively recommend bits of Clarke’s work where he’s treading a bit closer to the sublime than usual, or some of his short stories that are at least competent, fun short reads with some ideas or imagery or the odd line that sticks with you. I might not recommend any Asimov at all.
Some authors are good, no italics. Bradbury is good.
I totally agree. I wouldn’t recommend Asimov to anyone much over 12. After that point I’d hope kids to have outgrown him, like the Hardy Boys.
His non-fiction though ... among the best.
My "fairly poor writer of fiction" looks that way for a reason.
He was a fucking genius, and seemed never to stop writing books. Good qualities all told.
> take a look at Ian McDonald
+1. I loved Desolation Road in particular; a sort of 100 Years of Solitude but on Mars and with more than 2 names for its 3000 characters.
> more than 2 names for its 3000 characters.
God, thank you for this. Everyone seems to love that book and I found it hopelessly confusing and pointless.
Yes, that is one of my very favorite books. My life is measured in part by how often I allow myself to read it.
That book is so painful to read because of that lol.
> Bradbury’s stories are about people, deeply real and deeply feeling people. ... and less interested in exactly how the ray guns worked.
Maybe this is why I never really got Bradbury. When I read scifi, I can't help but consider the logic of the world that's being described, and Bradbury's worlds aren't really logical (e.g. who would live on such a strict timetable? wouldn't all the singing and rhyming be annoying? how is the house still being powered?). But it makes a lot more sense if the point is to convey feelings. Kind of like an impressionist painting I suppose.
FWIW it’s not that I don’t find the worlds logical, just that Bradbury doesn’t explain them. E.g., have you read Seveneves (Neal Stephenson)? At one point he spends about 30 pages describing in loving detail the tech behind a high-atmosphere human glider suit. Really cool stuff. I still don’t remember a damn thing about the person who wore it.
Were it Bradbury, or LeGuin, we’d have had two sentences about the tech behind the suit and pages about the people involved. We’d have learned more about the character and, maybe, our common humanity.
I really enjoy the original Earthsea books. I guess my expectations of sci-fi are different than magic/fantasy; technology feels like it should be explainable in a way that magic doesn't. I'd probably enjoy Bradbury more if I approached his stories as fairy tales rather than sci-fi.
I think that’s a fair take. A lot of his stuff is straight fantasy, some is very nearly realism; a lot of time he seems to enjoy ignoring the lines while he colors. Try “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” perhaps; almost zero science to it :)
I have the inverse perspective. I am uninterested in the mechanics because to me, all science fiction stories are actually stories about the present. The more mechanical a story is, the more I feel it is obscuring that truth. The author can never erase the fact that they are living in the present and that their work is ultimately about the present. They can only obscure it under layers of verisimilitude that, definitionally, is only an appearance.
I remember reading a golden age science fiction story where an engineer is angry because he dropped his slide rule as he was getting into his backyard moon rocket. We’ve not always been good at predicting the future, that’s for sure.
> I can't help but consider the logic of the world that's being described
Focusing your attention on the mechanical logic of a story's world is one lens by which to analyze it, but that is a choice and you can choose to analyze it from other lenses as well. Being able to apply multiple perspectives to anything is a useful skill to practice instead of tacitly accepting the view that comes most easily to us.
Thank you for suggesting Ian Mcdonald, have not read any of his.
I absolutely rever and adore Bradbury, probably because he has a knack of articulating so well, the emotions and esthetics that we have in common, that I leave unarticulated, more so now that I am no longer a teenager.
He captured childhood in a way that perhaps no one else has. His children have dignity and purpose and seriousness and are still absolutely full of joy and randomness. William Wordsworth, maybe, revered and portrayed childhood as well as Bradbury.
Dandelion Wine is one of my favorite.
I also love sci fi that explores the human condition. However my first foray into Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles) left me a bit cold. Are there other works you'd recommend?
Short stories are, IMO, where he really shines. The Illustrated Man is a good collection to start with, as is The Golden Apples of the Sun. But read them slowly, and (this may be a controversial statement) in a physical paper book.
the soviet cartoon version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc
The English description says "Russia, 1987". This is incorrect. It's 1984 (before the Perestroyka polity), Uzbekfilm studio in Tashkent (now Uzbekistan). Interestingly, the crew surnames are some Uzbek, some Russian, some Korean (Tsoi) and even one German last name.
Did the wall clock say 2027? There still time for our in house robots then.
The first thing I thought of. Beautiful version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(po...
Almost politically incorrect woke?
Another Bradbury adaptation
(Here there be Tygers)
I have a calendar reminder on August 4, 2026 to send a message to my high school English teacher from 20 years ago, for having this date stuck in my head that whole time.
The moment in time described in the story cannot be very long after the implied nuclear explosion, because surely the house cannot have more than a couple weeks' worth of bacon and eggs in stock.
Oh, just remembered this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1IxOS4VzKM (Content Warning: NSFW!)
I read this recently and wanted to post it on August 4. You jumped the gun!
The paragraph about the stove making dozens of breakfasts as the house collapses at the climax of the story is what always stuck with me most. It would take a better writer than me to say why it works so well, I just know it does.
What do you do with an impossible situation? You do what you can. This maniacal robot stove somehow evokes a sense of desperation we can instinctively empathize with. A fiction of an intelligent machine, facing doom, deserving of pity. Or at least I like that idea better than just some mundane physical explanation.
> It would take a better writer than me to say why it works so well, I just know it does.
One way to look at fiction is that it's a way to express an idea indirectly that defies explanation in literal non-fiction terms.
There are non-verbal thoughts and feelings we can all understand, but can't seem to put them into words in order to transmit from one brain to another without having to go indirectly through a metaphor or allegory.
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I read this in high school English class. It remains one of my favorites.
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I upvote anything Bradbury or Teasdale.
For anyone interested, here's a short game I made in 2 days for Ludum Dare back in 2019, which was inspired by the original poem and Bradbury's short story.
I didn't have enough time to balance the gameplay and add more scenarios, but it's a neat experience and contains one of my favorite personal musical compositions.
Poor dog. Depressive story from The Martian Chronicles with very futuristic smart home depiction. Not unusually dark for Bradbury though.
Selected Shorts had an episode where Kathleen Chalfant read this!
https://www.symphonyspace.org/selected-shorts/episodes/uncan...
I can't find the episode after a quick search... I wish there were an archive of their past episodes, but I imagine someone would have to pay extra to the performers for that right.
Soviet cartoon (1984) based on the story:
wow
how dare you make my feel my own feelings
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code