A Sound of Thunder

Coming up is my first chance to conduct an English class all by my lonesome. I will be teaching two different levels--honors English, and "regular" English. For honors I will be teaching a lesson on the poems "Ozymandias" by Percy Shelley, and I'll write more about that in this place later. For the regular class, I'll be discussing the Ray Bradbury story, "A Sound of Thunder."

I chose this story because it is in the literature book the kids have and I know it pretty well. I think most people know it, even if they haven't read it, because it introduced a concept into science fiction literature that has become a staple of the genre--time travel causing present conditions to change by altering the past.

H.G. Wells was the first to really codify time travel literature with his novel The Time Machine. But he did not broach the subject of the time travel paradox, i.e., that the present could be changed by altering the past. This is a fundamental scientific principle that suggests time travel is impossible--if I went back in time and killed my father before I was conceived, would I cease to exist?

Bradbury, in "A Sound of Thunder," takes this a step further. The story is set in the future (still the future for us, 2055). A company uses time travel technology to take rich hunters back in the past to kill animals, and the biggest trophy is a tyrannosaurus rex. But they are sticklers--the dinosaur was about to die from a falling tree, and thus its death by gun would not change anything. But the hunters have to remain on a path and not touch so much as a blade of grass or any other animal. If they kill anything, it could change the entire map of time.

The story is a bit clumsy in how it changes things. Eckels, the hunter who accidentally steps off the path and kills a butterfly, comes back to find that everything is the same except for the conventions of spelling and a different man won the U.S. presidency. It's hard to wrap one's mind around the notion that the changes would be that precise, instead of humans having tails or lizard-like tongues (which occurs in the Simpson's parody, "Time and Punishment."

But I'm sure Bradbury used broad strokes just to get a point across at a time when we didn't automatically associate time travel with this concept. Since then it has explored in several novels and films, such as the Back to the Future trilogy, the Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" and Stephen King's novel 11/22/63. It's a premise that is catnip for writers--if we could change time, should we? What would happen if we killed Hitler in the cradle?

"A Sound of Thunder" was first published in Collier's magazine in 1952, and reprinted in Playboy in 1956 (with the illustration above). So, yes, some people do read Playboy for the articles.