Parable of the Redesigner

Soft rains come in spite of us.

For the past week or so, a phrase has been knocking around in my mind that I cannot shake, so I share it with you now: There will come soft rains.

“There Will Come Soft Rains” is the name of a beautiful short story by the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, which he published in 1950 in response to World War II. (It also appears as a chapter in his beloved novel, The Martian Chronicles.) It tells the tale of a smart home set in California in 2026, a land now devoid of humans after a nuclear war. Miraculously, the house has survived, and automatic systems continue to attend to it, attempting to serve the humans they don’t realize now exist only as burnt silhouettes on the wall. The housekeeping is fastidious; the hospitality is gracious. I will let you discover the end for yourself, but I will say this: As a teenager growing up facing the existential terror of a deadly arms race, it haunted me then as it does now. 

The phrase itself is an homage, taken from a 1918 poem of the same name by the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet Sara Teasdale as her response to World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic. It is the deceased home-dweller’s favorite poem, and the mechanical voice recites it in the evening on schedule. Teasdale’s message, now intertwined with Bradbury’s, is equally poignant: Regardless of what humans do to the world or each other, nature will re-emerge, indifferent to our many violences.  

Rains, both soft and hard, have come to California to extinguish the fires that still rage in a neighborhood similar to one imagined by Bradbury and, perhaps more famously, by writer Octavia Butler, who — almost to the day — predicted the exact Los Angeles zip codes to be devastated by climate change, racism, misogyny, late-stage capitalism, authoritarianism, and wildfire in her novel Parable of the Sower.

“We had a fire today,” reads a Feb. 1, 2025, diary entry in the book, marking the beginning of the end. Since the fires in Southern California began, many passages from her work have been shared online, one of which stands out as both a touchstone and a lifeline: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you.”

Humans have touched so much and have been changed so little, at least, so it may appear to anyone alarmed by news of the day… after day, after day. A new government and unelected actors are taking sledgehammers to complex systems and social norms, to government, business, safety nets, and fundamental rights.  

In Bradbury’s cautionary tale, even the most advanced silicon creations could not save humans from ourselves or the planet from us. Butler, who weaved her own poetic reference by naming her novel after a Bible story, offers a simple seed of agency in the face of terrible things: God is change. Embrace it, even if it appears to be too late.

It feels like the right advice. So, as best we can, let’s touch, change, resist, build and build upon, read poems, and tell stories. Let’s plant seeds. Let’s be changed.

In the spirit of sharing phrases in my head, let me send you into your week with this paraphrased thought inspired by Butler: All that you touch, you redesign. All that you redesign redesigns everything.

What are we going to redesign for good?

A version of this essay appears in The Observatory newsletter. Sign up here. Featured image: “Dancing Girl Near Campfire;” iStock credit: Ensar Altinok.