The automated house, however, is unaware of this, and so the mechanical mice and other labour-saving devices continue to prepare breakfast for a family that will never sit down to enjoy it again. Sometimes known by the slightly longer title, ‘August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains’, the story appeared in Bradbury’s 1951 collection The Martian Chronicles and focuses on a house whose inhabitants have died out in a nuclear blast.
‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ is, like many stories Bradbury wrote in the early 1950s, haunted by the fear of nuclear war. Let’s conclude this pick of Ray Bradbury’s best short stories with one of his best-known. ‘The Veldt’ can be analysed as another of Bradbury’s cautionary tales about the dangers of technology, especially when it threatens the relationship between parents and their children. This 1952 story concerns a nursery in an automated home in which a simulation of the African veldt is conjured by some children, but the lions which appear in the nursery start to feel very real. However, even the Sun Dome cannot prevent them from slipping into madness and destruction.
In order to preserve their sanity, the spacemen take refuge in the Sun Domes on the planet. It’s about four men who have crashed on Venus, where it is always raining.
This is the earliest story on this list, from 1950, though it neatly dovetails with ‘All Summer in a Day’ above. In some ways, the story is a love story about a completely different species: one not seen on Earth for millions of years. The story contains a number of key themes of Bradbury’s work, especially in its depiction of technology and the need for connection and companionship. This 1951 short story is about a lighthouse whose foghorn emits a noise which attracts the attention of a primeval dinosaur living miles below the ocean. ‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’ is another allegory for the Cold War, and the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Perhaps the greatest literary rendition of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ ever written, ‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’ is from 1953 and tells of two cities ruled by emperors who continually seek to destroy each other by building their city walls into different shapes which will ‘beat’ the other city and make their own the greatest.
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