Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball,and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down. –Ray Bradbury

This story is a fantastic read, touching on life for a house after some unspecified nuclear disaster 16 years and two months from today. “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains” is part of Ray Bradbury’s short story collection, The Martian Chronicles. The story’s real success lives in the details. Bradbury uses rich, vivid description to make the house seem alive, and for all intents and purposes, the house is a living sentient being struggling with the loss of its owners in the wake of an awful calamity. By the end of the story you care about the house and want it — automated, mechanical parts and all — to succeed.

I don’t know. I was so excited to get started on By the Waters of Babylon, especially after reading Nightmare Number Three. But this 1937 short story by Stephen Vincent Benét wasn’t as good as the poem two years before. The narrator, a young man, tells the story of his journey to find out what happened to industrial civilization. His search for knowledge leads him to New York City, where he finds out why society collapses under the weight of war.

Although the story itself isn’t bad, the narration style annoys me. Our narrator is supposed to be this tribal man in search of knowledge.  But he speaks like the 1930s version of a tribal man for 5,700 words. After a while, you just get tired.

But the cars were in it, of course . . .
and they hunted us
Like rabbits through the cramped streets on that Bloody Monday,
The Madison Avenue busses leading the charge.

A robotic apocalyptic poem!  That’s what Stephen Vincent Benét’s Nightmare Number Three is. At first, I was less than excited about reading this little number from The List because of a natural dislike of poetry. But the poem was pretty great. Published in 1935, the piece is about American society’s dependence on machines. The end of the human race begins with automobiles turning against man. Things get worse from that point, leaving the narrator wondering whether he is the last man left on Earth.

As a bonus, there’s a fun little eighth grade quiz about the poem that some teacher somewhere made up. Here’s the link.

Also on The List, John Varley’s The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged) describes exactly what would happen if a nuclear bomb were dropped on us right now. The short story takes about 10 minutes to read, but the discomfort lingers for much longer than that.

Elizabeth Bear’s And the Deep Blue Sea is another short story found on The List. So far, this is the first story I’ve read from that list from the books and stories I haven’t yet read that is truly postapocalyptic. The story is a classic what happens after the [INSERT DISASTER OF CHOICE HERE] tale, in this case some kind of world-wide devastation following nuclear explosions.

Basically, the mail still has to get delivered, as the narrator points out in the opening sentences. Bear’s protagonist does that on a motorcycle. Although, it’s not clear why the world ended up this way (there are, however, obscure references to “the big one”), Bear does an excellent job of describing what a nuclear-ravaged landscape might look like years after a disaster. The story is easily a half hour read, and definitely well worth the time.