Even when the house is fully automated (as in "There Will Come Soft Rains"), the dad still comes home at night and gets his cigar lit while the mom does her errands. Something kind of interesting: evidently Bradbury's future included rocket ships, food pills ("The Wilderness"), and nuclear war, but not any kind of gender equality. We have "children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets" ("Rocket Summer," 1), and the narrator even tells us in "The Taxpayer" that it's an "ordinary Monday morning on the ordinary planet Earth" ("The Taxpayer"). That's six out of 28 stories, so we're definitely going to be spending most of our time on Mars.Īnd when we do see Earth, it's looking like a pretty ordinary, 1940s-style Earth, even if it is supposed to be 1999 or 2034. "Rocket Summer," "The Taxpayer," part of "The Fire Balloons," "The Wilderness," "Way in the Middle of the Air," and "There Will Come Soft Rains" all take place on Earth.
Most likely, Bradbury set the novel in a time far enough away so that new technology would be plausible (yay interplanetary rockets) but close enough that we still wouldn't have figured out some of those pressing global-civilization issues (boo nuclear weapons). (Presumably, the next edition will take place 20 or so years in the future.) When the stories were updated for the 1997 version, the first story took place almost 33 years in the future. When this book was first published, in 1950, the first story took place almost 50 years into the future. Let's start with the easy one: Time: The near future Okay, so we admit that setting might be a little confusing.
Mostly Mars-but kind of a fantastic Mars, partly like ordinary Earth and partly like the historical Old West frontier In the near future
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