Jennifer Hicks is director of the Academic Support and Writing Assessment program at Massachusetts Bay Community College. In the following essay, she discusses the imagery in Bradbury's story.

John J. McLaughlin wrote that "much of the bulk of [Bradbury's] fiction has been concerned with a single theme-the loss of human values to the machine." Nowhere is this more apparent than in Bradbury's collection of stories The Martian Chronicles. In this collection, as Edward Gallagher has pointed out, Bradbury has "dealt with the initial. . . attempts to successfully establish a footing on Mars," chronicled "the rise and fall of the Mars colony," and "linger[ed] on the possible regeneration of the human race after the devastating atomic war." Bradbury's story "There Will Come Soft Rains" appears in this last section. Yet, in this particular story there is not one single human character, it takes place in Allendale, California, not...