Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rain

Technology has been integral to humanity’s survival since the beginning of time. With the machines that were created in the industrial revolution and the modern era, people have much more leisure time than they did several centuries ago. But despite this, there is no denying the fact that some inventions have the ability to cause harm. In particular, the weapons that were created in the 20th century brought more bloodshed to war. Feeling the need to share their fear of global destruction with the world, many authors in the post-World War One and Two eras commented on this. In Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains, technology is shown to be helpful through the self-sufficient home and harmful through the setting and the disaster that happened to the house. In the beginning of There Will Come Soft Rains, the house runs through its program, getting everybody ready for the day. It even reads off special events that are happening that day, including anniversaries and birthdays. It cooks breakfast and then cleans itself in only 45 minutes: “The rooms were acrawl with small cleaning animals...sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped back into their burrows”. (Bradbury 286) The robots in

This setting shows that technology, particularly atomic bombs, have the capacity to literally destroy the world. The house in the story is the only house left standing, and all the humans are dead. The only living creatures are wild animals and the family pet, but it ends up dying in the middle of the story. Ray Bradbury ties technology with death in There Will Come Soft Rains, and seems to think that the more technological innovations we create, the closer our impending doom will come. Of course, they may be helpful in the beginning, as evidenced by what life is assumed to be like before the bomb went off, but then they will cause destruction of life and