As the Future Becomes the Past
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Today, we find ourselves living in a world that was imagined seventy-five years ago.
In 1950, Ray Douglas Bradbury (1920–2012) published a short story called "There Will Come Soft Rains". The story opens with the words:
The story opens with the words: "Today is August 4, 2026". For readers of that era, this date represented a distant future. For us, however, it is now the present day.
In this seventy-five-year-old narrative, Bradbury focuses on humanity while depicting the future. Ironically, however, there are no people in the story. Instead, the story centres on a house that carries on living. The morning alarm rings, breakfast is prepared, the rooms are cleaned, and the daily routine continues. The house continues to perform the tasks it has carried out for years, following the same routine. Yet there is one problem and the saddest part of it all; there is no one for it to serve.
This concept is compelling in its own right. However, it was inspired by another work. Moreover, the title does not belong to Bradbury. It is taken from a poem of the same name written in 1918 by the American poet Sara Teasdale (1884–1933). I would urge you to read this very short poem. For those who would rather not, the first two lines are given below.
“There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;”
We are talking about a work that emerged during the First World War and the Spanish flu pandemic. Such devastating global events clearly made people feel the need to cling to something. It's similar to what happened to us five or six years ago. Perhaps, a hundred years from now, what we produce during this pandemic will be interpreted in a similar way, who knows? Remember that everyone's world changed, and we all felt the need to embark on different journeys. This is part of human nature. So it is not surprising that, during such major crises, we turn to nature, art, and creativity.
In the poem, nature speaks without uttering a word, yet its authority is undeniable. According to Teasdale, even if humanity were to destroy itself through war, the rain would still fall. Birds would still sing, trees would still blossom and spring would still come. This is because nature will not notice humanity's absence. It will continue to exist in accordance with its own order.
In Bradbury’s work, however, it is unchanging technology that takes the place of Teasdale’s unchanging nature.
Even after humans have disappeared, the systems they created continue to function. Programmes run and clocks tick on. Automation carries out its tasks flawlessly. Yet by the end of the story, we realise that technology can still be defeated by nature. A fire obliterates a system that had functioned flawlessly for years, reducing it to ashes in just a few hours.
In my view, Teasdale and Bradbury complement each other well. Teasdale explores the insignificance of human nature, while Bradbury explores humanity's transience in the face of technology. However, the two works were written thirty years apart. Despite this, the underlying idea is the same: both works remove humanity from the centre, yet both seek to place it in a specific context so that it can understand its surroundings.
These two works are interesting for another reason, too. I would therefore like to draw attention to the perception of time.
For the author’s readers, 4 August 2026 was once considered a distant date in the future. Put simply, many of the original readers are probably deceased by now. They probably never considered whether that date would ever be reached. Human beings are fragile not only in the face of nature and technology, but also of time.
I suppose that's what the future means: being carried along towards dates that we don't know if we'll live to see rather than random moments that make no sense. So, what does the future hold for us? 2050? 2100? These dates are mere ghosts that we cannot touch.
Yet look, that future has now arrived. The calendar pages have turned, and the date that we referred to as “the future” for years has become just another Tuesday.
The passage of time reveals new things to us, and this is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of science fiction and dystopian works. Rather than showing us the future, these genres reveal how we perceive it. Technology shapes our perception of the future. It is fuelled by the imagination. It takes on a seemingly supernatural form. It often evokes positive feelings. Until those days actually arrive, that is.
Judging by such narratives, the future seems to end at the calendar to which we are confined. However, there is no reason to be pessimistic. The questions we ask will etch us, our poems, and our stories into the fabric of time.
I mentioned the short story; let's reflect on it. Much of what was described in that story has come to pass. Today, we have smart homes. We have robot vacuum cleaners, voice assistants and automation systems. Some of the things Bradbury imagined have truly entered our lives. However, “There Will Come Soft Rains” is not just significant because it predicted these things.
What matters is the question it asks us: if we were to disappear, what would truly remain?
Humanity lives on through its creations over time. This story has travelled from seventy-five years ago to the present day, carrying within it a poem that predates the story itself by many years. Bradbury continues to be read and remembered not because he accurately predicted the future, but because he asked questions that will remain relevant in the future too.
Teasdale envisaged a nature that would endure, even without humankind and despite the ravages of war. Years later, Bradbury reinterpreted this concept in the context of the technological era and the fear of nuclear annihilation. While one author claimed that nature has no need for humanity, the other demonstrated that humanity's established order is meaningless without nature.
The fact that this article is being published in August brings with it another small but pleasant coincidence: Sara Teasdale was born on 8 August and Ray Bradbury on 22 August. Although more than thirty years separate their birthdays, today we commemorate them together in the context of the same poem, story and questions. I am grateful to both of them for their voices that have reached us from the past.
The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlour. The parlour into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under. Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke. Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: "Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is..."
Could it be that the finest works are not those that foretell the future, but rather those that speak from the past to the future, reminding us of our place in the world?
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