All Summer In A Day

At the time Bradbury wrote “All Summer in a Day,” scientists knew relatively little about Venus’s climate or terrain. This mystery made it a popular choice of setting for works of science fiction—a genre that was enjoying a golden age of newfound popularity and respectability in the mid-20th century. Bradbury himself was in no small part responsible for bolstering the genre’s image; his work, which he began publishing in the late 1930s, often used science fiction as a vehicle to explore philosophical or political ideas. The most famous example of this approach is likely his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, which was published just one year before “All Summer in a Day.”

However, the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s differed in key ways from earlier examples of the genre, as stories like this one demonstrate. Where late-19th- and early-20th-century writers had tended to view scientific progress positively, later writers were more skeptical of technology’s ability to create a better world (Gunn, Eileen. “How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future.” Smithsonian Magazine, May 2014, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-americas-leading-science-fiction-authors-are-shaping-your-future-180951169/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2021.). In “All Summer in a Day,” for example, it’s clear that manmade “sun-lamps” are no substitute for the real thing, and their shortcomings are typical of the broader future the story imagines: one in which technological advancements have severed humanity’s connection to the natural world.