Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04)
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Ray Bradbury's story "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set on August 4, 2026, the present date.
In the story, an automated house in Allendale, California, continues its daily routines after a nuclear war has destroyed the city and killed its inhabitants. The house prepares meals, cleans itself, reads poetry, and announces the time. A dying dog enters and is incinerated. The house's silhouette of a man, woman, and children are burned into the west wall. At night, a fire starts from a fallen branch. The house fights the fire but fails; it collapses, leaving one wall repeating the date.
What commenters are saying
Several comments flagged the submission as a duplicate of an earlier post. A top comment warned that the linked copy is severely abridged (about 1,016 words versus the original ~2,100) and omitted key passages including the dog's search for its owners, the nursery sequence, and the house's panic. The commenter noted passages were crudely compressed and called the version badly corrupted. A link to the standard text was provided.