Today is August 4th 2026…

I may have mentioned before that my dad was a huge science fiction fan! He was an avid reader and had a whole bookcase full of dog-eared science fiction paperbacks, which he read and re-read regularly. Our house seemed to be full of books!

We had three bookcases upstairs and two large ones downstairs, filled with a wide variety of novels and non-fiction, large hard backed books and small paperbacks. He even had a few antique leather-bound volumes, going back several centuries! One of these bookcases had three full shelves of Readers Digest condensed volumes, popular at the time, each of which had three or four stories in!

I grew up knowing that reading was a good thing, and was to be done at every opportunity, even when I got told off for reading under my bed covers with a torch when I was supposed to be asleep!

We had a 12″ black and white TV (those were the days!) and I remember seeing the original versions of films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Fahrenheit 451, The Day of the Triffids, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and many more over the years. There were quite a few science fiction / supernatural mystery type series on TV  too in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Tales of the Unexpected, The Twilight Zone, The Expert, Dr Who (which I found terrifying when I was very young! Those Daleks..!!) And then of course, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Logan’s Run, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Planet of the Apes, The Invisible Man… to name just a few! We seemed to spend our lives looking far into the future and trying to imagine what it would be like!

Happy memories! And it was the many conversations about life, the universe and everything, that I had with my really quite intellectual dad (though he was a humble shop worker his whole adult life) while I was growing up, which trained my mind to enquire, search, be curious. I think it was this that made me seek God, since I could clearly see this world did not come about by chance, and I was pretty sure after my sci-fi saturated childhood, that aliens were simply the product of imaginative minds and not who created the human race!!

Anyhow, if you’re NOT a science fiction fan, you may not have heard of Ray Bradbury, or his 1950 short story called, “There will come soft rains” which is what caused me to write this post. It is rather different to my usual style of scribbling, I know, but when I realised what the date was, it just had to be done! 

So, it was a story about an automated (smart) house in California, which carries on doing all the things it has to do, reminding the family it’s time to get up, preparing breakfast, cleaning etc., but the people have all been wiped out in a nuclear strike some time before. As time goes on the house starts to fail and is then eventually destroyed by fire, as its robots and automated systems try in vain to overcome it.

I heard this story narrated on the radio one evening, as my dad listened. I’m not sure how old I was, perhaps 12 or 13, but the one thing that has stuck in my mind over many decades, is the house waking up and saying, “Today is August the 4th 2026!” When I was a child, that date was so far in the future it was inconceivable, yet here we are!

Today is indeed August 4th 2026 and, praise God, I’m still here to tell you about it!