Original : Mon Sep 13th 1993 Edit #1 : Tue Oct 26th 1993 C.E.L. By Z-N0TE !! "A Sound Of Thunder" Author Ray Bradbury A short story I have read and enjoyed this year was "A sound of thunder" written by Ray Bradbury. This story was written in the mid 1950's in the US. The story is a science fiction fantasy based on time travel. The main characters in this story are Eckels and Travis, and the story mainly revolves around these two. Eckels is a wealthy man who aims to impress people by telling them about his hunting activities. Although Eckels has been on a lot of safaries he is a very cowardly person, if he thought that there was a chance of being injured he wouldnt go along. Throughout the story Eckels proves he is very childish and thoughtless, when he breaks the rules by stepping off the anti gravity path into the wilderness he begs and offers to buy his way back back to his time. He needs things to be explained to him in the simplest possible terms and is apprehensive about the hunt : "Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?", "Was it succesful ? Did all of us get through alive ?" Travis is the safari leader, he is ruthless but intelligent, violent but thoughtful. Travis is the one who knows what to do, when to do it and what not to do and when not to do it, he knows that when dealing with the past safeguards are required, he is intelligent but not arrogent and tries to explain to the rest of the party what he means. He also has a forceful side, when he orders Eckels to retrieve the bullets from the T-rex's mouth for example. Without Travis the party would blunder and wreck havock. Lesperance, Billings, Kramer and "the man behind the desk" are the only other characters in this story and are not that important to the plot. The story begins in the future, around the year 2055 with Eckels outside the company "Time Safari Inc". Eckels is paying the man behind the desk $10,000 so he can go back in time and hunt the largest pray, a dinosaur. Eckels seems concerned for his safety and asks about if there are any guarentees that he would survive the hunt. Eckels meets Travis and they head for the time machine, the time machine is described as "an aurora of colour" that is for ever changing, with "all the hours piled high and set aflame". Eckels and Travis enter the machine and begin their decent into the past. The time machine builds up momentum and starts to rocket back in time. It is now that Eckels asks about killing the dinosaur dead with the one shot.Travis tells him that they can but some dinosaur have two brains. "The Machine Stopped." Travis shows the party a metal path that is levatating above the ground. He warns them to keep on the path or face harsh penalties.Eckels questions Travis, "Why ?". Travis again explain to Eckels about disrupting the time space continuum by killing a small animal that future generations would be affected and that throughout the tens of millions of years the minor error would multiply beyond his wildest dreams. Eckels asks how they know which dinosaur to shoot. Travis tells him that earlier Lesperance went back in time to shoot a red paint ball onto the side of a dinosaurs back that is just about to die naturaly. Eckels asks "But if you came back this morning in time you must have bumped into US, our safari! How did it turn out ?" Lesperance says "That'd be a paradox" , "Time doesnt permit that sort of mess - a man meeting himself". The party leave the machine, Travis senses the beast up ahead, he tells the men to release the safty catches,he tells Eckels to take the first shot, Billings second and third Kramer. Suddenly silence filled the air. "A sound of thunder." Then appeared the t-rex,Eckels says "It could reach up and grab the moon". Eckels suddenly realises that he cant face this monster and Travis tells him to go back inside the time machine. The dinosaur sees the party and Eckels panics. Eckels tried to run the machine but finds he cant move, he stumbles off the path into the grass. The monster tries to grab at the others and they begin to shoot at the beast. The t-rex fell down, pulling trees with it. Inside a bag of fluids burst, the liquid covered the men. The men headed back to the machine where they met Eckels, Travis ordered him onto the path and told him he was not coming back with them. Eckels tried to buy his life back and Travis tells him to collect the bullets from the dinosaurs mouth. Eckels collects the bullets and heads back to the machine. The machine is sent forward in time, returning to 2055. They arrive back in the room they set off in, but there was something different about it. Travis tells Eckels to haul ass. Eckels noticed the notice ! This time it was written in the way you would pronounce the words not in their English form. "TYME SEFARI INC, SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST." Eckels franticly searches his boots, he picks up a mound of earth. In the mud there is a butterfly, a stiff butterfly. Eckels asks trembling : "Who won the presidential election yesterday ?" the man behind the desk replies "Deutscher of course!", he asks if they can bring the butterfly back to life and take it back in time, he sits there eyes closed, he hears Travis click the safty catch on his rifle. "There was a sound of thunder." In the story Ray uses colour a lot. In his descriptions of certain things. When he describes the way the dinosaur moves and looks for example : "A great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily reptilian chest." & "Its armoured flesh glittered like a thousand green coins." He also uses green to emphasise the way the past looked without man disturbing it with pollution. The scenery, the dinosaur, the time machine and even the rifles are all described using colour so that we can imagine what they actually looked like. The author also uses sound to a great extent to boost the realism of the story. Although this is a book and not a film you can imagine the sound of the dinosaur when it sees the hunting party and when the time machine is whoosing through time to the desired destination. Even the sound of the rifle at the very end when Travis executes Eckels for his stupidity. Also the usage of simile and metaphor is obvious, when he describes the dinosaur as "a great evil god." and the way the animal looks "Its armoured flesh glittered like a thousand green coins". By using them you can relate more to the story as he describes things using comparisons of things we know of today. The images Ray impresses upon us are that if we try and change things that were meant to be, like time, we may and probably will cause damage to the future. We now know about the dangers of pollution, CFCs and smoking where as in the 1950's when this story was written these discoveries were to be made. In the 1960's/70's there was the risk of a nuclear war which would end mankind and make the Earth unsafe for thousands of years although the threat still exists today it is looking less likely because we know what the outcome would be. Although we think we know what we are doing today what ARE we still doing that will suddenly become relevent to us. Ray also is trying us to look after we have and not screwing things up for future generations. If we hunt a certain animal we may wipe it out of existance if we kill off a plant today that is worthless and in 10 years a disease appears which could only be cured with that plant ... We should think of the consequences of our actions before we hastily do something rash. The story has been well thought out and makes you think. -- Z-N0TE, Monday September 13th 1993.