Yeah, I really didn’t feel anything listening to Ray Bradburry’s There Will Come Soft Rains. I really do mean that the only real emotion I had was disappointment and anger that I didn’t feel anything, both being completely meta-textual. My first thoughts were: “maybe it’s all that violence and movies and sex on TV I’m just desensitized to it all” However I quickly realised two things. 1 I have been moved by a range of media, Fire Emblem Echos: Shadow of Valentia, Stiens;Gate 0, and Mob Psycho 100 to name some that come to mind quickly. Hell, just a few days ago I watched The Holdovers which made me experience emotion and awe. So thankfully I’m not an emotionless dead husk, barring last Tuesday that was rough, but why didn’t I experience anything for There Will Come Soft Rains. Like any good artist(or maybe scientist) when I don’t get it immediately I break it down technically and lay its faults bare.
First up audience, this piece was written for the people of the cold war early 50s and 60s folks on edge over when the bombs would drop, I am not in the 50s nor am I in a cold war(sort of) so I’m not able to directly relate. Beyond the war aspect of the piece there is meant to be a sense of dread I suppose(?), we’ll get to that. This dread is not a new feeling to the human race after all the poem that inspired and is used in this piece was written in 1915 during the Flu pandemic. Even after the fact the idea of some nothingness after us is a nominal almost trope concept. So much of our media has post-apocalyptic settings even Kirby games show a desolate earth as early as Kirby and the Crystal Shard for the N64. There is a whole game franchised built around specifically cold war postapocalyptic adventures called Fallout. What’s worse is that because of my exposure to all of these different stories if seen the worst versions of this and the best versions of this already and this piece is mundane by comparison.
Pacing: Where do I start, there are several lenses in which to read this work. You could read this piece as an Existentialist, apathetic to the changes of reality only interacting with what is not what was or will be, you could read it as a shock piece designed to make you jump with a twist, or you could even read it as a reflection of the current(50s) times, and how that holds up. This piece has failed to meet any of these standards. This piece is like existentialism without existential dread, there is nothing to make us feel small or insignificant in fact the world of the story(the house) literally falls apart and burns after only days without us around. There’s no nature returning either the family dog dies in a frenzy after realizing it’s alone and dies. The poem that this piece inspired creates a better sense of dread and meaninglessness and it directly says nature barely notices were gone at one point. Take 2001 A Space Odyssey at the end of this movie you watch a man realize he is aloe, grow old, and die after years of doing nothing, the cuts of the movie are almost confusing as we jump through time seamlessly because these years were truly empty and meaningless. This was all done with out a note of dialogue or on-screen text, not even a montage just hard cuts and open rooms. (love that scene) If it is meant to have a twist well shit. I almost want pacing to be its shown section but whatever this story has no pacing. The whole piece is metered by the time of day we hear the hours change sentence by sentence. Regardless, the events and reveals of the story are thrown through with no thought seemingly. After all, within a few paragraphs the outside is described as having a nuclear glow(I’m not listening to it for the 5th time I can’t remember the exact phrasing) on my audiobook for the piece it was 4 minutes before what I assume is supposed to be the real twist or shock that being the charred silhouettes of the family, captured by a split moment in time like a photograph. This was the gory reveal that the bombs had dropped and this was one of the last remnants of humanity. There are 8 more minutes of the house burning down after this. I don’t require all twists to come at the tail end of a story like in Planet of the Apes however I would like it to be a shock like say realising this strange planet is the one you just came from after thousands of years. There is nothing wrong with hints either this makes reingesting the media all the more interesting as you now understand more details. This doesn’t happen in this story you know, you always have. The only character in the book: the house (fight me I can see you) it shows most of the emotion, baring the dog, and takes all of the actions. It gets mad at cleaning up after the dog, it feels the vaguest sense of dread at there being none around, and it fights a fire and loses. But it also maintains the status quo, it holds a tight lock on the house as if afraid of the outside. It is not hard to see some potential connection to the red scares the paranoia of the time. There is also the parallel of it dying in a ball of fire it doesn’t stand a chance against, even though it thought(hoped) it might. But it stops there. As a final example I want to talk about Nier Automata, mostly because I want to (NineS is my king). The machine life forms in this game serve as the horde of enemies, mindless and single-minded however they have begun to access old world data of humans and earth(oops another post-apocalypse lol) this makes the act out old human practices like plays, carnivals, war, families, sex, and just human things. But they don’t have all the information they don’t understand or recognize why they do things or what they’re doing they are just mirroring what little data they have about and trying to make it look close enough. It is a mockery of our current lives an imperfect representation of what we do every day, and yet it’s almost exactly the same in that it’s mindless, repetitious, and meaningless despite feeling so necessary.
Damn, that covered existentialism too, maybe I should bring up one of the many twists too;#a$77%SD7D^4&*No let’s wrap this up. To Bring this all the way back around to the point. This was poorly paced, dry, scattered uncommitted, and almost intentainly missing a basic philosophical concept necessary to the horror of the cold war. It was rudimentary, not bad or flawed or primitive, it is linguistically elegant at least and captures a fraction of cold war fear if you squint, but for me in the now after some hype and seeing everyone else seem to be deeply moved by this. It was like being expected to feel awe and amazement at the sheer craft and ingenuity of a wooden wheel, even though I’m used to the rubber and aluminium wheel that came after. It is the unrefined predecessor of a trope and genre so warn out and perfected it is more often a secondary descriptor or afterthought in a story or setting. I’m just not impressed, and maybe I shouldn’t be, maybe it’s a good thing that we have gotten so much better at story craft worldbuilding and themes that writings from 70 years ago are tripe in comparison. We are supposed to improve from our predecessor and raise they base level of quality as time goes on.
And thus “Really, a wooden wheel, as a tire?”