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"There Will Come Soft Rains" is a short story by science fiction author Ray Bradbury which was first published in the May 6, 1950 issue of ''Collier's''. Later that same year the story was included in Bradbury's ''The Martian Chronicles'' (1950). ==Characters and story== The story begins by introducing the reader to a computer-controlled house that cooks, cleans, and takes care of virtually every need that a well-to-do United States family could be assumed to have. The reader enters the text on the morning of August 4, 2026, and follows the house through some of the daily tasks that it performs as it prepares its inhabitants for a day of work. At first, it is not apparent that anything is wrong, but eventually it becomes clear that the residents of the house are not present and that the house is empty. While no direct explanation of the nonexistence of the family is produced, the silhouettes of a man, a women, two children, and their play ball are described as having been burnt into one side of the house, implying that they were all incinerated by the thermal flash of possibly a nuclear weapon. The house is described as standing amidst the ruins of a city; the leveled urban area is described briefly as emitting a "radioactive glow".〔Bradbury, Ray. "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains." The Story and Its Writer. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Bedford/ St. Martin's, 2011. 116-121. Print.〕 The house is the only thing left standing, and continues to perform its duties, unaware that the family is gone. At one point, further insight into the demise of the family is given when a tape recorder within the house recites a poem by Sara Teasdale called "There Will Come Soft Rains". The poem describes how the Earth's other living things, and implicitly nature as a whole, are unaffected by an event of human extinction that has occurred as the result of an unnamed disaster. At ten o'clock p.m., the house is finally destroyed as well when a gust of wind blows a tree branch through the kitchen window, spilling cleaning solvent on the stove and causing a fire to break out. The house warns the family to get out of the building and tries shutting doors to limit the spread. The house also attempts to fight the fire, but its water reservoirs have been depleted after numerous days of cooking and cleaning without replenishment. The house burns to the ground except for one wall, which continues to give the time and date the following morning. In the original ''Collier's'' story, the story's events take place in a deserted house in the city of Allendale, California,〔There are actually three locations of that name in California, and it is not clear which of them Bradbury had in mind.〕 on April 28, 1985 (a year changed to 2026 in later printings). The title and motif of the story, as outlined above, comes from Sara Teasdale's 1920 poem, "There Will Come Soft Rains", which had a post-apocalyptic setting inspired by World War I. The imagery of the poem is echoed and expanded in the story. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「There Will Come Soft Rains (short story)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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