Theme: Our house … is a very, very, very smart house

Episode Connections
Authors, stories. Sara Teasdale, “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Dean Koontz, The Demon Seed. Alan Weisman, The World Without Us. James Tiptree Jr., “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain.” McSweeney’s.com. Fritz Lieber, “A Pale of Air.” Larry Niven, “Inconstant Moon.”
Films. The Demon Seed. I, Robot. Back to the Future. Mad Max. Planet of the Apes. Winnie the Pooh.
TV episodes, series. Ray Bradbury Theater. The Jetsons. The Jeffersons. Life After People. Little House on the Prairie.
Ideas. An automated house that survives a nuclear holocaust. Lots of human routines. Housing automations always fit around human routines, which makes sense. Hues lights. Alexa. Smart thermostats. But the story is really a post-WWII anti-war story rather than one about automated houses. The story puts human ingenuity at odds with human weakness as a warlike species. Once we are gone, nature reclaims the spaces we occupied. What will be the last thing left to represent us when we are gone? The Teasdale poem from which the story gets its title was a post-WWI offering that was published during the 1918 Flu Pandemic. Kitchens are often the center of the house these days. Everyone needs an incinerator in their home. Bill Williamson’s trash rockets … the wave of the future. Vinyl is nostalgia now. But not 8-track tapes. We have now explored a lot of apocalyptic visions with a variety of causes.
Whoa - Hmmm - WTF. Dan says it is definitely a Hmmm story to begin with, but maybe a little bit a Hmmm - wtf. As in WTF did you humans do? Bill says it is a bit of Whoa because there are no humans.

Previous episode: James Tiptree Jr., “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain”
Next episode: Roger Zelazny, “For a Breath I Tarry”

Music Credit: "Ouroboros" Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
Link: Creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/