August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains

by Ray Bradbury

Genres: Short Stories, Classics, School, Science Fiction

5 pages, Paperback

About the author

Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.

Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. Bradbury also wrote poetry which has been published in several collections, such as They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001).

The New York Times called Bradbury "An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation" and "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".

Reviews

[Amanda Foto]

A story where everything that is supposed to be alive is dead and what is non-living seems alive…lead to a discussion on the removal of man’s place as steward the natural world and wrestling with the question - is the elimination of suffering the peak of happiness?

(Read for a work seminar but really enjoyed it)

[☆ angela ☆]

god i loved this so much

[Ray]

I think it's pretty cool that I read it today, August 4, 2026. The dystopian world pictured in this short story is not very far from our reality. Ray Bradbury would not have believed today's world if he were here now. In iran 2026 we saw way more terrible things happen and nobody actually cared. Thousands of innocent people killed by the regime and the survivors still are traumatized, stock in those two damn nights of January. We didn't think spring would be so rude to even dare coming up; but it did, as it does every year; as it would have done even if all of us, all 8 billion of us died the day before.

[Josh]

"And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked."

Making a house your main character is actually such a skill. Loved the use of setting and ambience, very haunting and apocalyptic.

[Wren]

I read this today, the day it is set. We live in the future and the future is uncomfortably close to what is imagined here. All the technology exists to create the fully automated home as described, and there is war and conflict and weapons which would just as feasibly leave a similar nuclear wasteland. It is sad but perhaps not terribly surprising that in the year 2026 we have not only just as much of these bad things like war as in all of human history but also new and terrifying ways in which to carry them out. I can’t say I expected an uplifting Bradbury short story, but this one felt almost too on the nose.

[Sophia]

Read this for my AP Lit class.

This is by far the most upsetting short story I have read this year.

You can feel the silence of the house and the absence of the family weights heavy on your shoulders.

To think that we are now living in the year that this story takes place and (at the time I am writing this) are only 6 months away from the date this takes place only adds to the horror. Everyone should read this because it is a brutal wake up call to the reality that we are living in.

Natural will not lose a wink of sleep when we die and should we really blame it?

[sofiac]

Escrito en 1950, trata sobre un 5 de agosto de 2026 apocalíptico y depresivo. Hoy es 5 de agosto 2025, a un año de que sea haga real o no FOERTE

[Henrique Costa]

Que escrita apocalíptica. Personificação seguida de personificação e uma rotina que prossegue, no seu automatismo, como se o mundo não tivesse chegado a um beco. Trata-se daqueles casos pontuais onde tenho de dar, com todo o prazer, 5 estrelas! Aqui deixo, portanto, a passagem mais visual e pujante de todas:

"The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Stillfarther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

The five spots of paint - the man, the woman, the children, the ball- remained. The rest was a thin
charcoaled layer."

[Courtney Kleefeld]

This short story is set August 4, 2026 and I got to read it on that day yesterday.
Later republication of the short story has changed the year to several decades in the future, the 2050s.
I thought it was interesting. It feels vaguely familiar, and I feel like I read this in highschool co-op a long time ago.
A few technological advances in here are familiar, like "Oh yes, we do have this, except it's not exactly like that." And then some other ones are "Yeah no one has this yet but that would be nice."
Only 5 pages, worth the read! Can be found here: https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_T...

[Nahyan Ameen]

Considering Bradbury wrote this in the fifties, before people knew about global warming, this is a prophetic story. With the California wildfires being all over the news the last couple of years Mr Bradbury seems to have the gift of divination. Mark your calendars!

[Mark]

not to be a sucker but the dog part really is emotional. to think that our automated devices and even with the rise of genAI now, if there really was an apocalyptic event where all humans died, would they be stuck in endless feedback loops to each other like this? beautiful writing

[Eva]

Read it on August 4, 2026, and, ironically enough, we have a lot of the features of the story, including parts of the smart house, just missing the cleaning mice. Unfortunately, it also seems we are close to nuclear warfare.

[azul.g]

"Perhaps this is not a ghost story at all, but I like to think it is. It is the story of the ghost of a house and the ghost of a civilization"


Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 2026, today is...

[jennavee 🎀]

little boring

[kary]

no rate since I do not rate books I read for school but I just read this while my dad went to sleep

[Вікторія Слінявчук]

The best part of it is Sara Teasdale's poem

[Tima]

2.5

[Lou Brault]

Studied in English class this afternoon, a masterpiece.

[riley]

this was SO good however i just wish it was longer

[Riley]

😟

[Maria]

... Horrifying

[Sluggy!!!]

Today is August 5th, 2026,

[Ida K]

Today is August 4, 2026

[Torry M]

What a privilege to have read this on August 4, 2026!

This was eerily beautiful and I loved it!

[Ryan Saver]

I read this because it takes place today, 8/4/2026.

[savannah]

It’s Aug 4th, 2026!

[Nora]

read for today. soft rains will come indeed :')

[Gavin]

Today's the day, August 4th 2026...

[PCB]

I guess we're all reading this today, huh?

[Tabitha]

I remember being very moved by this the first time I read it; I could imagine being moved again later.