A Sound Of Thunder

About A Sound Of Thunder

“A Sound of Thunder” is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury, first published in Collier’s magazine in 1952. It was reprinted in his collections The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), R is for Rocket (1962), The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980), Dinosaur Tales (1983) and A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (2005). It was later reprinted in The Young Oxford Book of Timewarp Stories. The Locus Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections lists it as the first of the top ten most republished science fiction stories

This well-known story about time travel revolves around a business called Time Safari, Inc. Time Safari promises to take people back in time so they can hunt prehistoric animals, such as a Tyrannosaurus rex. In order to avoid a time paradox, they are very careful to leave history undisturbed on the principle that even the slightest change can cause major changes in the future. Travellers are only allowed to shoot animals that are already about to die, and they are required to stay on a path which hovers slightly above the ground. Hunting trophies are not taken; no souvenir is allowed except a photograph of the hunter standing next to the dead monster.

In the story, a hunter simply known as “Eckels” is about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime: to travel back into the past on a prehistoric safari and kill a Allosaurus. As the participants wait to depart, they chat about the recent presidential elections, in which an apparently fascist candidate, Deutscher, has just been defeated by the more moderate Keith, to the relief of many people. After the party arrives in the past, Eckels is warned about the necessity of minimizing their effect on events when they go back, since tiny alterations to the distant past could snowball into catastrophic changes in history.