Ray Bradbury: There Will Come Soft Rains
“There Will Come Soft Rains” is a short story by Ray Bradbury published in May 1950 in Collier’s magazine and later included in the collection The Martian Chronicles (1950). Set in the near future, the story presents us with a fully automated home whose inhabitants have disappeared. Although there are no longer any people to serve, the house continues to perform its routine functions: it prepares breakfast, cleans, reads poems, and performs a series of other tasks that serve as a memory of a family reduced to nothing more than shadows on an exterior wall.