A Sound Of Thunder

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was an acclaimed American author and screenwriter famous for his science fiction and horror short stories, his work on the popular TV series The Twilight Zone, and most of all his novel Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury was very concerned with issues of censorship, state oppression, and the effects of technology.

“A Sound of Thunder” is an action-packed short story that takes place in 2050. Though the story takes place in the future, Bradbury wrote it in the years after World War II, and it alludes to the fears and concerns of the 1950’s following the war. These fears include the threat of fascism, anxieties about technology, and technology's negative impact on the environment. While Bradbury is widely considered a science fiction author, he resisted the categorization, arguing that his books depicted the fantastical and unreal rather than someday possible. In addition, the story contains elements of action and adventure, with high tension and high stakes passages.

Since A Sound of Thunder imagines a future in which time travel is viable and has been commercialized, it can be considered speculative fiction. Speculative fiction is a broad category of fiction that takes place in a world that is, in some ways, unlike our own, and usually involves futuristic or supernatural elements. This includes imagining what life would be like if certain technological changes were to take place.

The story opens following an election in which a dictatorship was narrowly escaped. This election bookends the story, as it ends with the realization that Eckels’s actions in the past have caused Deutscher, the dictatorial candidate who represents fascism, to be elected instead of Keith, who represents American democracy. The inclusion of political elements in a story about hunting a dinosaur is characteristic of Bradbury’s work, which often concerns censorship, dictatorships, and questions of freedom and knowledge.

In this story, the characters see the past as both a threatening place and a safe haven from the political turmoil occurring in the present. Bradbury writes of the jungle as a “primeval garbage dump” (118), but the officer also reveals that people telephoned Time Safari to express the desire to go back in time if Deutscher was to win the election. This dichotomy reveals the dangers of nostalgia—people may look to a simpler time for guidance but doing so may give rise to dangerous ideologies—like Deutscher’s authoritarian politics.

Bradbury includes rich descriptions in the story, such as of Eckels’s physical states of anxiety and panic, of the jungle and its animal inhabitants, and most notably of the Tyrannosaurus Rex that the hunting party kills. These descriptions showcase Bradbury’s technical skill while helping make the events of the story come alive. Key to this is Bradbury’s commitment to fully describing setting, in particular the ancient jungle. Through dazzling descriptions of the jungle, Bradbury conveys the sense of wonder that Eckels is experiencing and solidifies the story as an action and adventure tale.

While the story’s political backdrop is important, it has a strong environmental and techno-critical bent, too. Eckels’s footstep causes irrevocable damage to the environment, which eventually leads to damage to humans. This metaphor suggests that damage to seemingly insignificant components of the ecosystem can have ripple effects outwards—eventually causing grave harm to humans. The death of the butterfly—a soundless death—contrasts with the thundering death of the Tyrannosaurus Rex; while what seems to have been the more significant death changes nothing, the seemingly insignificant death of the butterfly that went unnoticed causes a complete shift in the future. Bradbury's message is twofold: the smallest things can change the future, and technologies can be disastrously dangerous. Time Safari, though they think they have accounted for all factors that would lead to a change to the past, have failed to account for the human element of fear. Additionally, as Eckels pleads with and bribes Travis to no avail, Bradbury implies that neither money nor technology can fix environmental damage.