Alex's Reviews & Recs: "The Long Rain" by Ray Bradbury

It was only a matter of time before I reviewed a sci-fi story. As one of my favourite fiction genres, I find myself drawn to anything sci-fi related, but usually in the tv and film realm. “The Long Rain” by Ray Bradbury is a sci-fi short story I read back in middle school, long before I learned about Bradbury’s much more notable work, Fahrenheit 451. But even with a lot of his fame residing in his novel, there’s also much to observe in his short stories. 

A notable trait of this work is how cinematic and action-packed it is, making it well-suited to film adaptation. As I said, I’m very drawn to sci-fi shows and movies so you could imagine the excitement I felt when I found out that the short story had in fact been adapted into the visual realm. It appeared as an episode on The Ray Bradbury Theater, an anthology series containing film adaptations of Bradbury’s short stories. The episode was thoroughly entertaining, and it was extremely immersive to actually see the settings and characters described in the story. However, the episode did take some artistic liberties and change a few parts of the original story, including character names and one scene that I thought demonstrated very well the struggles these characters had to experience. And with that, I think I ought to stop jumping around the point and really tell you about the story in its original form.

Like I mentioned with the episode, there’s this very immersive element that is captured through the simple but effective language and imagery. As the reader, you are dropped into the aftermath of a spaceship crashing on Venus, a planet encompassed by a nevending, torrential downpour. Now, at the time this story was written in 1950, the real climate of Venus wasn’t really known, so in the realm of current scientific accuracy, this story is far from it. Still, Bradbury was able to create an intense, rainforest-type setting in the opening paragraph. 

We follow a group of four soldiers, led by a character named the Lieutenant. Two of the other men are named Pickard and Simmons, while the fourth man is left unnamed. The group is in search of one of the many Sun Domes, a series of safe havens built by humans that provided shelter and warmth on the otherwise rainy planet. A Sun Dome is powered by its own individual sun, and throughout the story it is treated on the same level as some kind of mythic place, despite being very real. There is this doubt that I have about the Sun Domes, however. I wonder if the reality of their existence is even plausible, as even though one of the characters states that he’s lived on the planet for ten years, it seems that none of them have actually been inside a Sun Dome. There’s this theme throughout the story about clinging onto a false hope that begins and ends with the journey to find a Sun Dome, and in my reading I wonder if they were even real to begin with. 

As the characters begin their walk away from the ship and towards a Sun Dome, something that stood out to me was how the dialogue was integrated into the piece. Despite there being four characters, there are minimal and sporadically placed dialogue tags throughout the story. This creates an element of confusion about who is speaking, although it becomes easier to understand as the story progresses. I think that choice of partially confusing dialogue was completely intentional, as the rain itself creates this confusion and delirium among the characters the more frustrating and prolonged their journey becomes. It puts you, the reader, in the same waterlogged boots of the characters, which was neat to experience. 

I thought it was interesting how the story only shows the characters at their worst. We see for the first time in the hellish aftermath of a crash, and proceed to follow them through a treacherous journey that turns them around, misleads them, and drives them insane. All they know is the rain, and they drown themselves in it. One by one the group meets unseemly ends after giving up on the Sun Dome, except for the Lieutenant. The ending leaves you on a cliffhanger, and what the Lieutenant finds could be seen as the light at the end of the tunnel, his saving grace, but going back to my point about whether the Sun Domes are even real, I can’t even believe that what he finds is real as well. Like how someone lost in the desert will begin to hallucinate mirages of water or civilization, this is what I think happened to the Lieutenant. 

This piece tells the tale of a group of men lost to the depths of a minimally traversed planet, having the worst time of their lives, pursuing something that within the story you can’t even confirm if it’s actually real or not. There’s something so simple but so fascinating about seeing a character keep going when everything around them is telling them to give up, and I think even despite being wrapped in the sci-fi of it all, Bradbury is able to capture that feeling very well. This short story is definitely worth reading, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at the rain quite the same ever again.