Themes:
Bradbury’s tale, devoid of human characters and concerned with failed technology, presents several themes that explore the dark side of inventions.
1. Life Vs. Technology :
“There will come Soft Rains” is the story of an automated house equipped with the latest gadgets that are supposed to serve human beings and make their lives comfortable. The story revolves around life – like technology – both anthropomorphised and animalistic and relegates actual human characters to aside. All the routine chores such as – cooking, cleaning, washing dishes and clothes, making bed etc. are done automatically although its human residents (the McClellan family) have perished in a nuclear explosion.
Bradbury presents a chilling contrast between the technology and life by using the automated house and the absence of human life that it was designed to serve.
Bradbury describes the house which is a marvel of automation and design and equipped with human and animalistic characteristics. Most of the automated functions of the house are done by robotic animals. Example, “robot mice” and “copper scrap rats” clean the house, “twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth” and even the nursery is full of artificial animals like “iron crickets” and “butterflies of delicate red tissue” for the amusement of the children.
The house’s human like characters are described with many “voices” – including a voice telling weather, a voice for reminding time, a voice to date and day and a voice to remind the birthdays and anniversaries and important engagements. A voice is also assigned to read the poetry aloud. The house’s attic is also described as a “brain” as it acts as a controlling centre for its automatic devices. The house activates several mechanisms to protect its most vital “organ” its brain like “attic” like a human body protects brain.
All these points suggest that the house exists in a space between life and machine; it performs essential human functions and the technology itself takes human like and animalistic forms.
Although the house’s technology maintains its human like functions but still to some extent its inhuman characters are described by the author. The story takes place after the human family (McClellan family) has died in a nuclear explosion, but the house is oblivious of the fact and carries on as if its residents are still living, it continues to cook, voice reminder about the day, lay out martinis for the parents, provide entertainment for the children and so on.
The house’s inhumanity is clearly visible in its treatment of the family dog, which is suffering from radiation poisoning and panicked to find itself all alone in a world utterly different and changed. Although the house is fully capable to care the dog and feed it but it makes no attempt to help the dog as it is not designed to do this. Even the robotic mice that clean up the dirt that the dog tracks in are “angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience”. After some time when the dog dies, the robot mice instantly whisk its body into the furnace without any hint of disturbance and even expresses no feeling at all.
The technology continues its routine mindlessly oblivious of the absence of the human residents, highlights the absurdity as well as the dangers of over reliance on technology.
The story lays a dystopian world in which technology dominates human beings who for their leisure and ease become dependent on automated devices and gadgets. In fact, it is the technological development that have been responsible for the atomic bomb.