Research Guides: Sound of Thunder, A: Critical Articles

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The Physics of Ray Bradbury's 'A Sound of Thunder'
An examination of the physics of Bradbury's story.
The Time-Travel Story and Related Matters of SF Structuring
Examines time travel paradoxes in science fiction including "A Sound of Thunder"
Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel.
The article examines the more modern tale of time travel, "The Time Machine," by H. G. Wells. It demonstrates how the treatment of time as a kind of space provides authors and audiences the opportunity to experiment with issues of agency, to consider the ethical implications of timelines that may or may not be flexible and of futures that may or may not be fixed. "A Sound of Thunder" is used as an example of a fixed future. Useful for background on HOW time travel works in narrative.
Simulating quantum 'time travel' disproves butterfly effect in quantum realm
In Ray Bradbury's 1952 science fiction story, "A Sound of Thunder," a character used a time machine to travel to the deep past, where he stepped on a butterfly. Upon returning to the present time, he found a different world. This story is often credited with coining the term "butterfly effect," which refers to the extremely high sensitivity of a complex, dynamic system to its initial conditions. In such a system, early, small factors go on to strongly influence the evolution of the entire system.

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