Has anyone ever read "A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury?

[EstimatedProphet]

Excellent short story...
The gist: A time machine company ogranizes big-game hunts for dinosaurs. At the beginning of the story there is a big election for president that has just taken place between a normal candidate and a Joe Freeper evil Nazi guy. So, they go back in time and do their hunt. The big-talking hunter panics when he see a dinosaur, and backs down. He gets ordered to pull the bullets from the dinosaur. While he does that, he steps off the protective path that keeps people from the future from interacting with the Mesozoic, and tromps on a butterfly. Hilarity ensues when they get back to their present and find out that Joe Freeper has now actually won and the population is Freeperized (worshipful of might, admires bullies, illiterate).
So my question is: did this actually happen at some point? Is this story really a documentary? Sure feels like it...

[TennesseeWalker]

1. I've read it in Comic Book form.

I've got a little trade paperback of time travel stories, and it's got a graphic novel depiction of "A Sound of Thunder". Bradbury was worried about police states, and so was Heinlein.

By the way....have you ever read "Alas, Babylon" by Pat Frank? I highly recommend it.

[EstimatedProphet]

2. No I haven't

I'll have to look that up sometime.

[CrownPrinceBandar]

3. Unfortunately Heinlein was a McCarthyist....

I heard the fear of global communism freaked him as much as Ashcroft is with calicos. Too bad. I like Bradbury though.

[Dogmudgeon]

4. Yep

A good short story.

The interesting turnabout was that the Great White Hunters were the conservatives in the familiar universe, and the liberals in the changed one.

Bradbury has always been interested in politics, and has a deep distrust of the conservative streak (Pournelle, Drake, Heinlein revisionsts, royalty-fetishism in fantasy, "Extropianity", etc.) in Sci-Fi Fandom.

--bkl

[Terran]

5. One of Bradbury's best known stories

Probably read it as a teen when I first discovered RB (I think I got a copy of "The Illustrated Man" for my 11th birthday). I said here a long time ago that life under Bush felt like living in an alternate timeline, only our timeline is the one that's gone awry, thanks to some poor character's bumbling, and is the one that gets fixed (i.e., terminated) by said character eventually. That doesn't happen in Bradbury's story, of course.

I think one part of the story you're misinterpreting (but who knows, maybe you're right)--when you say people are illiterate after the time traveler returns, I assume you're referring to the different spelling system that he finds. I always figured that was just a subtle consequence of the alteration to history--I think that that spelling was right for that history, just different, not "illiterate".

Dirk

[EstimatedProphet]

6. I see your point. It was the "timeline-correct" spelling I do refer to

However, I always thought Bradbury was making a point by how he wrote the messages-it's been a long time since I've read it, so my memory doesn't hold up on the exact phrases, but they were along the lines of "Yoo hunt the animalz", "Yoo shoot itt", etc: short, stunted, spelled in a way that looks clumsy to us and I think because of those things Bradbury was suggesting institutionalized illiteracy.

[bookworm65t]

7. movie version of this story?

a while ago I heard that there was a film version of this story in the works. Does anyone know anything about this? If so, hope they don't screw it up.

[Shakespeare]

8. Yup, indeed there is.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318081/

Also, a new adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 coming out next year:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0360556/

He's a busy old fart for an octogenarian!

[EstimatedProphet]

9. VERY COOL!

A sound of Thunder would make a great movie! Wonder who will play Bush?

[bookworm65t]

10. Ben Kingsley is in the cast?!!!

:bounce: wunderbar!!!!!!

[Hand]

11. It's been done...

As a half-hour segment of Ray Bradbury Theatre, which you may be able to find on some SF cable channel. I've seen a few of these, though, and they're really nowhere near as good as the original stories.

Bradbury's a hard one to translate to film; hasn't been done succesfully yet, not even by Francois Truffaut. (He did a version of Fahrenheit 451 years ago; it was bloody awful.)