A Sound of Thunder
Time Travel! Dinosaurs! Philosophical ponderings! Great Prose! What more could you want from a sci-fi story?
The Facts
Text: A Sound of Thunder Author: Ray Bradbury
Genre: Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction Year: 1952
Available: The Golden Apples of The Sun Anthology
OR Available online (Free!)
Content Warning: Guns, Hunting, some description of blood and gore.
The Fiction
It's a new month which means we're moving on from our flash fiction period into a new time! And speaking of time...this week we go back to genre fiction, specifically one of my favourite genres: speculative fiction. Even more specifically it's sci-fi time nerds!
This week's story is by a science fiction legend, American author Ray Bradbury. A Sound of Thunder does what all great sci-fi should do: it tells a fun and imaginative tale, while also asking and/or exploring bigger philosophical questions. In this case the plot of the story takes place in the year 2055 and explores the concept of time travel. In the story time travel is being used by the company Time Safari Inc to, well, to offer safaris through time. Instead of expeditions out to the wilds of Africa, Bradbury imagines a company leveraging the power of time travel to offer clients the chance to kill animals from other time periods. Which, honesty, is a pretty believable thing humanity would do with time travel under capitalism.
The story focuses specifically on the safari of a man named Eckles, our main character who pays 10,000 dollars for the chance to go back in time and kill the greatest predator in history: the Tyrannosaurus Rex. His safari is with two other hunters, as well as his guides Travis, and Travis' assistant Lesperance. When they arrive in the jungle in the past Travis explains that everyone must stay on the floating anti-gravity path set up by the Time Safari. Why? Because as Travis explains they are not supposed to be in the past, and if they accidently touch so much as a blade of grass they could change history and interfere with the future. Time Safari Inc chooses the animals it lets people hunt very carefully by finding and marking animals right before their natural deaths and bringing the hunters to them minutes before they would die anyway. Travis admits he doesn't know if an action as small as killing a mouse in the pre-historic era would effect all of human history, but it could, and he's not willing to chance it to find out.
After this is explained we finally see what the group has come to the past for: the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Only when Eckles see's the beast he panics, claiming that it is too ferocious and he made a mistake thinking he could kill it. Travis tries to order him back to the Time Machine seeing he can't handle it, but in his panic Eckles runs off the path. The rest of safari manage to kill the T-Rex, without any of them dying but Travis is furious. He threatens to leave Eckles behind, not because he panicked and endangered the group, but because when he panicked he ran off the path and potentially changed Time. After forcing Eckles to dig their bullets out of the T-Rex (since they can't leave these objects from the future behind) Travis takes them all back but threats Eckles that he still might still kill him if his actions changed their future. Eckles protests that all he did was run through the dirt and he couldn't have changed anything.
When they arrive back in 2055 things are the same, but they aren't. The air feels strange, words are spelt differently, and worst of all the dictator who we learned lost the election in the original timeline has been elected President of the United States in this one. Eckles, distraught pulls at the mud on his boots and finds a butterfly he crushed. He despairs that such a small thing could have created such a cascading effect through millions of years of time. He hears Travis cock his gun and the sound of thunder.
The Feeling
So we can see that A Sound of Thunder brings it with a cool and imaginative plot. The concept of a time travel safari is awesome. But like all good sci-fi Bradbury has more to say with this story than just a cool idea. There is more point to this story than just time travel and dinosaurs.
Thematically this is a story about inter-connections, about how even the smallest things inter-connect and effect the world. This idea might sound familiar, probably under the term "the butterfly effect". Interestingly enough this story pre-dates the term, which is named after the idea in chaos theory that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane. It's kind of incredible that Bradbury wrote this story about how a butterfly being crushed changed all of human history before the concept of "butterfly effect" was even introduced in theoretical physics in the 60's.
The smallest things effect history in this story. The death of a butterfly, one coward jolting off the path, and time is changed. I think it is significant that in the story the greatest evidence of the future being changed by the actions of one cowardly man is the election of a dictator as President of the United States. I just think that's an interesting connection that Bradbury made. That has no relevance to the modern world. That the actions of one or a few people acting out of fear and self interest instead of following the advice of experts and staying on the path could ruin the future. Isn't that interesting?
One of other things that stands out in this story for me is that the prose is beautiful. While science fiction often stands out for its imaginative plots, or grander philosophical commentaries from a literary perspective it isn't often discussed as an artistic genre. However, this story manages to do all three having a fun plot, genuine commentary on the inter-connectedness between humanity, nature, and history, and beautiful prose. A Sound of Thunder includes imagery like, "There was a sound like a gigantic bonfire burning all of Time, all the years and all the parchment calendars, all the hours piled high and set aflame," and "those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous gray wings, gigantic bats of delirium and night fever." The image of a time machine as a bonfire burning calendars? Awesome, evocative I see the allusions to time travel as both beautifully powerful and destructive. Pterodactyls as "bats of delirium and night fever"? Hardcore. Just fantastic word choices.
In the end what effect do we have on history? On the present? On the future? A Sound of Thunder tells us that our world is holistic. That even the smallest things, a butterfly, a coward, a choice can change the future.
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