"There Will Come Soft Rains" is one of Ray Bradbury's most famous stones. Also known as "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains," the story was written and published in Bradbury's highly acclaimed collection of stories, The Martian Chronicles, in 1951. Written in an era in which many people were concerned about the devastating effects of nuclear weapons, the story depicts a world in which human beings have been destroyed by nuclear force. The central irony of the story is the fact that humans have been destroyed rather than saved by their own technology. The atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan, were recent memories in 1951, and many readers and critics found Bradbury's images of a desolate planet haunting and cautionary. In a further moral lesson, Bradbury shows how human technology is able to withstand the demise of its maker, yet is ultimately destroyed by nature, a force which prevails over all others. The story, which happens in the future but takes its title from a poem by a nineteenth-century writer, is a prime example of how science fiction literature can encompass moral and philosophical concerns.