Real Bradbury hours

 

This is a poster for Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” (I know I wrote my last blog post on this, I swear I’m not that Bradbury brained, I just think that this is a very ripe story for both analysis and posterization. I’m really not the biggest fan of Bradbury on the whole).

The overall composition is simple, calling back to other stories of the Bomb like Fail Safe and The Hunt For Red October. White and black dominate the poster; white, backgrounding the ruined buildings on either side of the suburban house in the center, represents blinding nuclear fire, while the black, cool, calm, and paradoxically boiling up from a mushroom cloud, represents the strange peace the house is thrown into.

Let’s examine first the large upside-down T, the form which most dominates the page. We’ll call it Form 1 for convenience. The form is simple, being only two rectangles, with only two comparatively similar and neatly partitioned colors. Both vertically and horizontally, it fills most of the space in the page. These serve to communicate to the reader the mechanism-paradigm the story takes as its status quo: the simple, sharp, lines, the muted colors, and the sans-serif fonts evoke not only the neatly machine-partitioned machine home, but also the (remains of the) neatly laid out street-gridded city around it. The broader form, that of an upside-down T, is bottom heavy and stable, symbolic of the sense of stability and immutability the house projects; the broad base, however, is composed of a blood-colored composite of ruined buildings, significant of the fact that the nominal paradigmatic stability is an illusion in a world dead by nuclear fire.

The images which make up the base of Form 1 are an amalgamation of many different styles across many different periods: the unit images are, from left to right, the skyline of San Francisco, a crumbling English cathedral, a drawing of Paris taken from a Medieval manuscript, a ruined building in the modern prefabricated style, and a crumbling Ancient Greek colonnade. This mixture is significant of two things: first, the sense of both history and enormity carried by the world killed by the bomb, and second, the strange anachronism of a story written in 1950 and set in 2026, the notion of machine minds running on memory tape and machine houses laying out automatic martinis and bridge tables.

Underpinning the entire composition, lower than but broader than Form 1, is the blossoming base of a mushroom cloud. The image is taken from one of the Operation Plumbbob detonations, but it is fundamentally generic: it is very much representative of the nuclear bombing which created the paradigm of the story. It is deliberately inverted, black rather than hot whites and reds and yellows, in light of the fact that in “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the nuclear bomb is in fact a fundamentally meta-creative force: were it not for the background nuclear war, the paradigm the house finds itself in would never occur.