When I was in high school, I read a book called the Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. It had a lot of really deep stuff that I don’t think I truly grasped until I read it a second time. There was one story, though, that freaked me out even the first time I read it, although what really made me think was my mom’s reaction to hearing it. It was called There Will Come Soft Rains. It was all about a smart house, the only house still standing, even though none of its inhabitants had survived a nuclear disaster. Even though they were all dead, the house kept trying to live, continuing the routines that had been programmed into it. When I read it the first time, I just kept waiting for the happy ending that never came. When there were certain details described, mom knew exactly what was going on, and stopped what she was doing to listen. That’s how you know it’s a good story.
When I read it the second time, only a few years ago, two things jumped out at me. The first was how his idea of a smart house is a lot more plausible now with our devices linked and things that can be set on timers, with our robot vacuums and other robot appliances, with our thermostats that also can monitor the weather. But the second was the date. August 4, 2026. I was going to live through a date set in a sci-fi story.
When I realized this, I had a silly idea. I was going to create a blog post and schedule it to be released on August 4, 2026. I thought about saying something about how I hoped that Ray Bradbury’s envisioned future had not happened, and that everyone is still doing fine, but in case they’re not, here’s a small message from the past. I would sum up what was going on at the time I wrote the post, and wonder to myself how much will have changed by the time it was published. But life was a lot of crazy chaos, and the idea of the post completely slipped my mind, and now the day has come and gone.
I am happy that we are not living in a nuclear war…but with all the war going on overseas, the fear of something developing is not an unreal one. Ray Bradbury was creepily accurate in his electronics predictions, but also in his predictions of how no matter how many years go by, we still have so much conflict and struggle, and such potential to bring so much oblivion.