‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ made me feel absolutely devastated; immersing me slowly in its melancholy world of rubble, dust and ashes burning away in a nuclear war. Is by far the shortest, sharpest and most depressing short story that I have ever read. ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ is a snapshot that perfectly captures all of the social paranoia in society during the post war period of the 1950s. Rendering the beautiful and power mind of Ray Bradbury in a 4 page short story. Bradbury was at his absolute best when portraying the overwhelming sense of desolation and bleakness throughout the story. Like Ray Bradbury’s other short story ‘The Veldt’, ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ is a story that is able to teach yet another stingingly unforgettable lesson about technology that shines particularly through its literary aspects. Rather than portraying an entire dystopian world, Bradbury paints a burning image that lingers inside the minds of readers forever. “Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther 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.” Bradbury sets this unsettling image of this dark and dismal future that we one day may all encounter, summing up the ultimate picture of the destructive powers of technology that is devastating yet reminding. In my opinion the image of the destruction of technology cannot be any clearer in ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’. As I think the idea of juxtaposing the image of family, technology and destruction in one picture is perfect as it serves as a symbolic warning of the perils of technology. Ray Bradbury had seen this this