{"id":42328,"date":"2026-08-05T13:01:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T17:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=42328"},"modified":"2026-08-05T13:01:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T17:01:24","slug":"a-good-one-for-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2026\/08\/a-good-one-for-today\/","title":{"rendered":"A good one for today"},"content":{"rendered":"

There Will Come Soft Rains<\/em><\/a>, by Ray Bradbury. It’s a quick read, and you’ll know why I chose it for today, even if you think it should have been yesterday.<\/p>\n

I first read this in middle school I believe, and I’m almost certain it was a truncated version, ending when the poem does – which I think actually makes it better. It was written in 1950 and distinctly reflects the views at the time, though they carried into the 70s and early 80s pretty well – now, it might seem both overreaching and paranoid in its predictions for today, but that’s what science fiction is like. Still, very poignant.<\/p>\n

Also, the poem of the same name, quoted in the story, was written during both World War I and the Spanish Flu epidemic<\/p>\n

And here I add in another post that I’d started not too long ago, because it fits:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every once in a while, you come across some online article that rehashes various predictions from times past, mostly to guffaw about how wrong they were, but occasionally to highlight some prescient tidbit. Science-fiction writers have an especially hard time of it when they’re trying to depict some future civilization and have to guess what kind of things may have changed – occasionally while missing the ones they didn’t think would. I’d re-read Fuzzy Sapiens<\/em> by H. Beam Piper recently, and this one passage neatly illustrates what I’m referring to:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course, it was ending in a cocktail party. Wherever Terran humans went, they planted tobacco and coffee, to have coffee and cigarettes for breakfast, and wherever they went they found or introduced something that would ferment to produce C2<\/sub>H5<\/sub>OH, and around 17:30-ish each day, they had Cocktail Hour. The natives on planets like Loki and Gimli and Thor and even Shesha and Uller thought it was a religious observance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note that this is set five hundred years into the future, when we have colonized numerous other planets and have contragravity floating cars and so on. And yet, this passage by itself betrays the narrow timeframe that it was written within. Do you want to take a stab at it?<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the book, someone shoots a few movies of some particular subject, and has to go in to develop the film and make copies of it…<\/p>\n

So, if you know just a little history, you know ‘cocktail hour,’ especially the event that took place before<\/em> dinner, sprang up sometime after WWI, but by the late seventies had practically died out. Throughout the seventies and eighties, the dangers of smoking became well-known and the emphasis on smoking all the fucking time was disappearing rapidly, though it wasn’t until airline and restaurant bans (late 90’s and early 2000’s) that it began to, not really die out, but lose the majority of its social acceptance, going from that near-religious ritual to a bad habit that wasn’t publicly tolerated. And film became a fringe hobby by the 2010’s. This was following a growing popularity of cameras in general, in the boomer years following WWII, with movie\/cine film starting to become popular in the 60’s as 8mm became more available to consumers.<\/p>\n

So yes, the book was published in 1964, right around the peak of all of these, the author unaware that all three would vanish from prominence within a few decades. Coffee’s still going strong, however.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There Will Come Soft Rains, by Ray Bradbury. It’s a quick read, and you’ll know why I chose it for today, even if you think it should have been yesterday. I first read this in middle school I believe, and I’m almost certain it was a truncated version, ending when the poem does – which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,9],"tags":[8839,8837,8836,8838,8834,8835,8833],"class_list":["post-42328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random","category-science","tag-cocktail-hour","tag-fuzzy-sapiens","tag-h-beam-piper","tag-predictions","tag-ray-bradbury","tag-sara-teasdale","tag-there-will-come-soft-rains"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42328"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42331,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42328\/revisions\/42331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}