There Will Come Soft Rains (short story)

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This article is about the short story. For the poem by Sara Teasdale, see There Will Come Soft Rains.

There Will Come Soft Rains is a short story by science fiction author Ray Bradbury. The story is about a house in a post-human world. Through war, possibly a nuclear bomb, the inhabitants of the home, have perished. The intelligent house continues to serve the people who are not there. Throughout the story, which takes place over the course of a day, the house makes breakfast, cleans it up after no one has eaten it, and continues on with other domestic tasks, failing to notice the absence of the humans. In the evening, the house reads the poem, "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Sara Teasdale, further illustrating the premise of the story: That man, despite all of his achievements, will be forgotten the second he is gone. In the end the house eventually catches on fire, caused by a chemical reaction from mixed cleaning solvents, but the voice of the house remains, tolling out the date, over and over again.

There Will Come Soft Rains is also found as a chapter in Bradbury's 1950 collection of short stories in a novel titled The Martian Chronicles. The standalone short story and the chapter have slightly different endings.

This story is also known by the variant title August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.

In 1984 There Will Come Soft Rains was adapted into a short animated film in the Soviet Union, by studio Uzbekfilm, which can be found HERE