There Will Come Soft Rains

"There Will Come Soft Rains" is a science fiction short story by author Ray Bradbury written as a chronicle about a lone house that stands intact in a California city that has otherwise been obliterated by a nuclear bomb, and then is destroyed in a fire caused by a windstorm. The title is from a 1918 poem of the same name by Sara Teasdale that was published during World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic. First published in 1950 about future catastrophes in two different versions in two separate publications, a one-page short story in Collier's magazine and a chapter of the fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles, the author regarded it as "the one story that represents the essence of Ray Bradbury". Bradbury's foresight in recognizing the potential for the complete self-destruction of humans by nuclear war in the work was recognized by the Pulitzer Prize Board in conjunction with awarding a Special Citation in 2007 that noted, "While time has (mostly) quelled the likelihood of total annihilation, Bradbury was a lone voice among his contemporaries in contemplating the potentialities of such horrors." The author considered the short story as the only one in The Martian Chronicles to be a work of science fiction.