There Will Come Soft Rains Comparison

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, works in both unison and division with author Ray Bradbury, who wrote There Will Come Soft Rains. By comparing and contrasting these stories we are able to delegate how our current actions towards humanity and technology may, or even may not, affect the future Huxley and Bradbury feel strongly for. Both share a common goal to not only warn but help the reader reflect on the possible outcome of societal advancement.

A common medium used to express the lifestyle of these two worlds is language. Though there is not a common connotation of the futuristic scenes at hand, there are similarity in the vocabulary used to describe them. Unlike the setting of Brave New World, Bradbury gives his futuristic scene

a negative connotation, he describes his world as, “The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. (Bradbury 1)” and continues to account it by having a constant repetition of the date. In contrast, Huxley’s world, at first glance, is thriving and electric. There is a constant state of euphoria. He illustrates the new world in chapter 16, “The world is stable now. People are happy; they get what they want… and they never want what they can’t get. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma.” That being said, he too has a constant repetition of the World State’s motto, “Community, Identity, Stability,” that provides a backbone and, at times, irony within the midst of the story.

Another common attribute between both Brave New World and There Will Come Soft Rains is the theme, these stories are both written with the intent to convey to us ‘current-world’ readers about the demise we are obliviously plotting for ourselves.

Granted, in Bradbury’s story the acknowledgement is too late, and the world has continued to cycle and pursue the way it always has and always will with or without a civilization. Which I believe is the point of the story. Time will not stop and wait for us as humans to recognize our collapse, so in the end we really only hurt ourselves. Whereas, Huxley uses a messiah-like character, in this case John the savage, as a perfect archetype to show the extreme difference in what we know in comparison to what we could know as a lifestyle. There Will Come Soft Rains exemplifies the aftermath of what could or will happen as we advance as a civilization. Brave New World uses John as a minority, like the rest of the reservation, hurled into this advanced civilization and essentially suffocated in the midst of it. Truthfully we are all Johns, we are able to be empathetic with only him because we relate more with his lifestyle. Bradbury’s story only gives us a framework of the continuation of time after the wipe-out of the human race, an insider’s look at the

aftermath.

In conclusion, the connotation of both stories are able to give the reader a view from both ends of the spectrum, a before and after, even though their plots and archetypes are different, both Huxley and Bradbury are able to use different but yet similar mediums of literature to capacitate the theory of an over-intelligent society that inevitably destroys itself from the inside out. By using a foundation of a repeated quote or idea, the reader is able to fall back into the ironic theme these stories also share, the advances of our world aren’t always in our favor.