DIMENSION X - There Will Come Soft Rains / Zero Hour (Ray Bradbury)

DIMENSION X
There Will Come Soft Rains / Zero Hour
June 17, 1950
Ray Bradbury had a significant impact on 20th century literature with such classics as Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, among countless others you have no doubt heard of. Two of his short stories were juxtaposed in this episode of Dimension X, adapted for radio by George Lefferts. The first was debuted on radio within weeks of its publication as a short story, demonstrating how in-demand Bradbury's work was at the time. "There Will Come Soft Rains" was first published in Collier's Weekly (magazine) on May 6, 1950. George Lefferts seamlessly connects it to a second Bradbury short story, "Zero Hour", which was first published in Planet Stories Fall 1947 issue.
The stories present a vivid picture of how a preoccupation with comfort and luxury creates a blind spot to obvious threats, and that myopic arrogance can lead to an unexpected outcome which is actually quite predictable.
HISTORICAL GLOSSARY
When describing the destruction of humanity in the first story, There Will Come Soft Rains, the narrator says, "radioactivity burned his image into the side of the house." The frame of reference for this is the shadow imprints left by people incinerated near the hypocenter of the atomic bomb blast in Hiroshima and Nagasaki just five years prior to the airing of this show.
After the house burns down the recording of the poem repeats endlessly. The script reads, “(THE RECORDING SKIPS) ... that we were gone. ... that we were gone. ... that we were gone.” In 1950 the popular form of recorded sound for the public came from discs. Though both electrical and magnetic tape recording had been invented for use on a large scale by this time, cassette tapes for individual use did not exist in 1950 when this show aired. Thus the only recording device the writers could imagine in a home, even a futuristic smart-home, would have been what was called a “record”. A record is a disc with a groove that spirals from the outside to the inside in a continuous track. A needle-like instrument makes contact with the groove and vibrates in response to the modulations in the groove. This produces sound. When these disks were first invented they were made of shellac but in the 1950s they started making records out of vinyl, which was less brittle. Whether brittle, or less brittle, the groove in the record would sometime get a tiny crack. When this happened the needle could not continue through the groove and would simply go around and around the same section of the groove, repeating the sound on that section.
When the child, Mink, tells her father that “...the kids are helping the Martians.” The father refers to this as a “fifth column”. The word “column” in this idiom is referring to “one or more lines of people or vehicles moving in the same direction” (dictionary.app n.d.). This word is being used in a military context. If there is a column of enemy troops coming at you from every direction, that is north, south, east and west, then the fifth column would be coming from the inside. In other words, a fifth column is a group, within a group, who is assisting the enemy.
When the Mother, Mary, makes a video call to her sister Helen she asks about a black-and-white cake recipe. When vanilla cake and chocolate cake are together in the same cake it can either be a “marble cake” or a “black-and-white cake”. A marble cake has globs of chocolate cake swirled into the vanilla cake, or the other way around. A black-and-white cake, on the other hand, has sections of all chocolate cake layered with sections of all vanilla cake.

[@sylviahoffman9440]

Wow Ray is such a talent writer, I enjoy all of his stories. I really love how he predicted the smart house, roomba, and possible nuclear or climate change apocalypse 70 years ago. Incredible.
Neither of the stories wanted me to turn them off - they were very engaging. Loved them. Especially the poem. Thanks for sharing

[@sandeakilpatrick2386]

I've read these stories before and I liked them. Yes, it blew me away.
This version with all the side effects is much better!