Quite the reverse. That people say that the fear of war (nuclear or not) is "quaint" means that the wealthy and privileged first world has forgotten about war and that's not a normal state of affairs. The 18th and 19th centuries were wracked by war after war between major powers, culminating in the First World War ("the war to end all wars" remember?) and then Second World War in the first half of the 20th century. It was very surprising to everyone that another global war hadn't materialized by the 1980s.

Fear not, military rearmament spending worldwide has shot upwards as nations prepare for the inevitable wars to see who will be the new global top dog. We are all about to re-learn some old lessons, albeit at a heavy cost.

  >It seems quaint now,

Indeed he takes some other significant cues from Bradbury - who faced a similar, if less poignant, Road to Damascus moment upon learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

For example, the concept of 'Booklegging' is lifted wholesale from Fahrenheit 451, published a few years prior. Bradbury has oft-cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, and Miller makes his views very clear by the time we encounter the flanderised Atheist in the final third of Canticle - reinforcing his core theme of the juxtaposition of scientific progress and moral wisdom, and the shared thematic motif expressed by Montag in Fahrenheit 451 that the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction.

As such, it is clear to me that the fear of war - and the trendy nihilism imbued by the then innovative atomic variant - doesn't so much affect mid-century fiction as the cultural and societal upheaval seen as the Baby Boomers assumed their place as the generation in ascension. In many ways this echoed the post-WW1 Brideshead Revisted era of England, merely substituting a surplus of capital for a dearth of inheritors.

Thus, while both can be read as atomic jeremiads, they are more appropriately realised as treatises to the social and political mores at the time. The scare for the average American wasn't so much Nuclear as it was 'Red' - something that can be seen in the stubborn cargo-culting of very American Institutions and Practices in the post-apocalyptic canon. As can be seen across the US Sci-Fi Canon, preservation of self is often secondary to the preservation of American Exceptionalism; be it via an ICBM or the stochastic terrorism of McCarthy.

I remember aspects of their modern existence also being problematic (IIRC a house in florida with lots of windows doesn’t fare well without AC)

After reading Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, I'm surprised we as a species are still around.

Meanwhile, after 70 years we're still no closer to a safe long term solution for nuclear waste. Every new and untested nuclear reactor design falls into the same pro-innovation bias of failing to address it's own unintended consequences. Like the utterly wild and rarely estimated cost of decommissioning older plants.

It's actually one way this story about the apocalypse is more hopeful than the present day. We don't need the internet to make most of the things in that story work, but in our timeline we'd add it anyway to get and sell those good analytics.

This is the big mistake that so many people make: assuming that these folks are behaving irrationally, or somehow focused on something other than what is best for humanity or their own country.

The unfortunate truth is that these people are actually behaving rationally, and doing what they believe is in the best interest of their own country or even society at large. They are doing their best.

And, if you were thinking coolly and clearly, you would likely do the same things in their shoes.

This doesn't at all mean we're doomed - in fact quite the opposite. These are hard things to navigate (nukes, AI, etc) but we're up to the task and will come out the other side much better off.

Egomaniacs seem to always be the problem, but when one pops up in a country, the people, whether they have a choice or not, protect/ignore them. Your disposable remark, to me, is the key. Most need to wake to this fact and at least talk about it. (As for Hal Lindsay, he's just like any other nutjob author who uses grains of some truth to create fear and anxiety to promote his narrative.)

The sirens still exist, but the test schedule has slowed dramatically.

Some members of the Trump administration / military say a specific goal is to bring about Armageddon, and have not been fired for it:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...

Other religious fanatics outside the gov’t take a more circumspect public stand on this particular holy war, but aim to use the Supreme Court to convert the US into a religious dictatorship.

Here’s a primary source; an interview with the defense secretary’s pastor:

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/06/nx-s1-5822558/pastor-doug-wil...

And it would have happened for real if not for one man's refusal to push the button: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

That overhanging fear has been replaced by climate change and political instability but the foundations for it still remain.

This adaptation is heavily modified, but I think it adds to the whole thing. Soviet artists had an uncanny talent for making everything that's unsettling even more so.

We'll see this post again on that date!

All joking aside; an excellent animation

One problem I see is that corporations insist on collecting and reselling our data. As a result, a lot of people are reticent to get much automation. They seem to accept it with TVs, but other devices - it's just too much of an intrusion.

I say "a lot of people" but I don't know how many people it is, exactly.

There was recently a bit of a controversy with a refrigerator that had a big monitor on the door. That could actually be a cool feature: it could show you what's inside before you open the door. You could access it remotely if you're at the store and trying to remember if you have milk at home. But of course, the company started putting ads on it, and undoubtedly they're selling your data.

People want Rosie from the Jetsons, but the compute power required would be astronomical, the mechanical systems would need maintenance, and there would be real safety concerns.

With LLMs, we've got the wisecracking figured out...

Take the dishwasher, for example, loading it is very hard for a robot, but easy and quick for a human. Washing the dishes is boring for the human, but a robot gets a sort of sick and twisted pleasure from cycling that dirty water around for hours on end.

In fact, we've removed some labor-saving features of houses (laundry chutes went away decades ago, and only recently has "laundry on the bedroom floor" become somewhat standard) for "safety".

MAKE DUMBWAITERS GREAT AGAIN

> However, the US ban only covers new advanced robot models, not existing products that have already received FCC equipment authorization for sale in the US. The "action does not impact a consumer’s continued use of devices they previously acquired," the FCC says. "Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market relevant models approved previously.”

And Toyota robotics has been trying to solve loading dishwashers for at least 7 years.

And that's all the housework required really, vacuuming, mopping, dishwasher un/loading, picking random stuff off the floor, dusting is another minor thing to have done.

The vast majority of labor has already been solved with dishwashers and washing machines and dryers, electric ovens and stoves.

I'd be in favor of Apple entering that market.

I think they'll be a huge first-mover advantage because of the Chinese blockade preventing cheap clones.

What people really want is to have purpose, not pleasure.

In the United State police's defence once I was walking all by myself at 3 in the morning in Mountain View, peeking and crouching among the bushes for good shots with my camera. A police car approached me. It ended up being a non-threatening conversation. It was early 2002. All in all quite surprising given my brown skin and then long beard.

https://ibb.co/j9XFgjDS

https://ibb.co/Y7VyGb1w

God, I love Bradbury.

He gets the cops called on him regularly. It's insane.

I one of the reasons I liked the story was the embedded poetry. It adds a mindful stillness that creates a poignancy.

"Wireheaded by social media so hard you're unemployable" is at least as plausible as a city-scale antipersonel drone strike; even Ukraine's strikes against Russia are around 1200-1800/day.

We still do! Idk if that is changing anytime soon in my life at least.

Yes, but no. He's writing a story about a character (the automated house) that needs lots (relative to the story length) of explaining. "Linoleum" very quickly conveys "kitchen floor", helps anchor the story in details familiar to his readers - and most of those readers would know linoleum is quite flammable, so it also advances the plot.

Futurism is a heavy theme in most SF writing, but you shouldn't let futurism get in the way of good story writing.

https://www.forbo.com/flooring/en-us/commercial-products/lin...

If fossil carbon ever becomes (commercially) scarce, vinyl might end up the premium choice.

I predict plank will always suck.

Regarding linoleum let's agree to disagree. I for one appreciate it.

It is still present in my region to an extent. This year my relative bought an apartment where the kitchen floor is made from it.

There was a Soviet publisher Kniga (Book) that published only books about other books: book art, technology, bibliophile stories and so on. One of their books was a collection of short stories whose main topic was books, reading, writing or similar. One of stories was Bradbury's "Forever and the Earth", translated, of course, but very well. I was a teenager then an I remember being deeply impressed by it. I knew Bradbury, of course, but mostly from sci-fi and he wasn't really a sci-fi author. (One of Soviet sci-fi writers pointed out that Bradbury was pretty much anti-scientific in his stance.) That story made Bradbury stand out for me.

correction: 1984

Of course, writing about the future means you won't get everything right - especially once specific dates or years enter the picture and technologies are in use that haven't been invented (or invented and discarded) yet. Nobody predicted that World War III would last as long as it has, or be so full of utter stupidity. On the technological front, film projectors are relics in this era, and film-based storage never really caught on. On the other hand, videotape wasn't around in 1950, and even audio tape was a fairly new technology.

https://poets.org/poem/metropolitan-nightmare

> We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

In the 7th to last paragraph, second sentence, he lists the automated processes still going, including "cutting the lawn by remote-control mower".

Later on, like their neighbors, they can stumble thru the last years of their lives with Parkinsons or other chemically-induced afflictions or just slowly waste away with internal cancers while their lead-addled offspring elect criminal pedophiles and imbeciles to lead the whole country - backwards.

Man, I need to go to sleep. I do agree with your analysis though.

https://youtu.be/mTEUrdKehSg

We have phones to do that for us.

It's set in November, not August, and another 27 years further in the future (at least the version currently linked to on the front page).

You got downvoted for paraphrasing the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains", from which Bradbury took the title of his story.

I supposed that's to be expected online. Small consolation, but at least some of us understood you :)

  And not one will know of the war, not one
  Will care at last when it is done.

  Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
  If mankind perished utterly;

  And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
  Would scarcely know that we were gone.

I particularly like Bradbury's style. It reads very prose poetic. One of my favourite is Dandelion Wine, which you will probably hate.

My one complaint: it's rarely revealed when a story was published, and it took me far, far, far too long to realise that many of my favourites were many decades old.

That said, hearing a story read and acted by a skilled player is its own joy. I'm a good reader, but I'm not that level of good, and a few decades of listening to Shorts has improved my own inner-reading voice.

Available as a podcast, though the back-catalogue is parlous brief, largely due to copyright, I suspect. Still worth following.

Don't mind the dup, though.