A Sound of Thunder

[cyberghostface]

August 22, 2020 marks Ray Bradbury's 100th birthday. To honor the occasion I will post a few of his stories throughout the remainder of the week.

This is from Ray Bradbury Chronicles #4.

A Sound of Thunder takes place in the future where time travel is possible. Tourists are able to go on safaris to shoot dinosaurs and strict protocols are taken to ensure that history is not altered.



On the safari Eckels is told to stay on the path to prevent any disruption.


Eckels runs off the designated path. The other men shoot the T-Rex. Soon after a tree falls on the corpse, which is how it originally died.

Comments

[tripodeca113]

Commercially available time travel..it never ends well.

[owlbrigade1]

I intend visiting Vienna in January 1913 if I ever get the chance. I predict that it has a chance of ending very well indeed.

[shadur]

Prevailing theory about the events of that day is that several people have already tried that.

[owlbrigade1]

Are you thinking of Sarajevo 28 June 1914, because that does seem like a day where a bunch of time travellers all had a pile up? So many damn coincidences piled upon coincidence.

January 1913 is the month that Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Tito were all in the same city at the same time; also mainly in the same place too. they all hung out in the same group of cafes too. There is no indication that, apart from Stalin and Trotsky, they hung out together, just they were all in the same place. In my time travel fantasy, the big unsolved murder mystery is not Jack the Ripper, but the Vienna Stabber. Mwahahahahahah!!!

You don't think the evil laugh is a bit over the top, do you?

Also Sigmund Freud was there too, but he never met any of them at all. Which is a shame, because if ever there was a motley crew of people who desperately needed therapy...

[agharta75]

I can imagine Stalin and Trotsky passing Hitler as he was selling cheap paintings on the street and saying "in the worker's paradise artists won't have to struggle!"

[owlbrigade1]

In Soviet workers "paradise", artists get shot or made to get real jobs.

[agharta75]

It didn't turn out how they said it would.

[owlbrigade1]

It is high concept, and a classic, but like most high concept classics you cannot look at it too closely. If you do then you start wondering how any change a dead butterfly might have made could possibly outweigh a giant hunk of rock hitting the Earth with such force that it set the atmosphere of a full hemisphere on fire? If time travel ever is possible, then the only safe places to visit will be the dinosaurs or even before the Great Dying. Visit a land before the big reset buttons of planetary history were pressed.

[cricharddavies]

If time travel is ever possible, then everything we presently think we know about physics is invalid, and no current predictions about the consequences of our actions while time traveling mean anything.

[agharta75]

All right, now who stepped on that damn butterfly?

[scorntx]

"It was comin' right at me! You all saw it!"

[mister_terrific]

I have mixed emotions about Bradbury, because back in the late 70's I wrote him about becoming a writer and he couldn't have been kinder and more helpful. Actually got to meet him and had a picture taken with him back around 1996, which was a dream come true.

And then I found out that in his later years he'd become, for lack of a better term, Foxified, and that really saddened me.