short story time travel butterfly

A Summary and Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘A Sound of Thunder’ is one of the best-known short stories by the American writer Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). A time-travel story about how changing the past could bring about momentous and catastrophic changes to the future, ‘A Sound of Thunder’ is often taught and studied in schools and remains a classic of 1950s science fiction.

The story was first published in Collier’s magazine in 1952 and then collected a year later in Bradbury’s short-story collection, The Golden Apples of the Sun .

You can read ‘A Sound of Thunder’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Bradbury’s story below.

‘A Sound of Thunder’: plot summary

The story begins in the future, some time around 2055 (or after). A time-travel safari company in the United States, Time Safari Inc., allows animal-hunters to travel back in time in a Time Machine and kill a long-extinct animal, such as a dinosaur. A man named Eckels turns up ready to undertake his safari.

We learn that a US presidential election has just taken place, and everyone is relieved that ‘Keith’ won, rather than his opponent, Deutscher, an anti-intellectual who would have made America into a dictatorship.

Eckels is inquisitive, asking his safari guide, Travis, about the way the safari works. Travis tells him and his fellow hunters – there are two other men travelling back with Travis and his assistant, Lesperance – to stick to the path and only shoot where he tells them to shoot. They are going to shoot and kill a Tyrannosaurus rex once they arrive over sixty million years in the past.

This dinosaur has been specially chosen and marked by Lesperance with red paint earlier that day, so they make sure they kill the right animal and nothing else. The Tyrannosaurus rex targeted for the hunt originally would have died just a few minutes later in any case, so they know that, in killing it, they aren’t interfering with the past.

Travis is very firm when hammering home the importance of sticking to instructions to ensure they don’t interfere with the past. The US government doesn’t like them travelling back in time, so Time Safari Inc. have to pay them a lot of money to keep them sweet and take all sorts of precautions. When Travis tells them that even stepping on and killing a mouse so far in the past could alter the future – and their present from which they have travelled – in all sorts of ways.

This is because, especially over such a vast period of time, little things add up. That one dead mouse, had it lived, might have had a whole family of mice, who would each have produced their own families, and so on. Millions of potential mice would then never exist, if one of the men trod on it back in the distant past.

The foxes which depend on the mice for food would die out. The lions which prey on the foxes would starve. And eventually, when early cavemen evolved, they would have starved, too, and so a whole nation which that one man might have sired would never exist.

Eckels is dismissive that such small changes in the past could have such colossal ramifications. When they arrive in the past and spot the Tyrannosaurus rex targeted for their hunt, it is such a fearsome and majestic beast that Eckels grows terrified, claiming they will be unable to kill it. In his panic, he veers off the specially designated path on which they have been instructed to remain, and steps into the jungle.

The other men shoot and kill the dinosaur, while Travis, angry with Eckels, tells him to go and wait in the Time Machine. As a punishment for flouting his instructions and walking into the jungle, Travis makes Eckels go and retrieve the bullets from the mouth of the dead animal. They then return to their present world, with Travis in two minds over whether to kill Eckels for disobeying his orders and getting the safari company into trouble.

However, upon their arrival they notice that things are subtly different. Both the front desk at the safari company and the man seated behind it are slightly different from before. The air has a chemical taint to it. And the spelling on the safari company’s sign has changed, implying that the English language is different, too. They also learn from the man on the front desk that Deutscher won the election, rather than Keith, and has transformed the United States into a fascist state.

Examining the mud on his shoe, Eckels finds a dead butterfly. Killing the insect has wrought these terrible changes across time. Travis raises his gun and shoots Eckels.

‘A Sound of Thunder’: analysis

‘A Sound of Thunder’ is one of the best-known time-travel stories in all of science fiction, and the tale shows Ray Bradbury’s gift for economical yet lyrical prose, tight narrative structure, and sharp delineation of character.

We sense that Eckels is going to be a liability on the trip from very early on, and much of the key exposition is carried out through dialogue, as Travis firmly – and with growing impatience – underscores the importance of not altering the past, because this could have terrible consequences far in the future.

To emphasise this point, both Bradbury’s third-person narrator and Travis, the key moral voice of the tale, repeatedly stress the interconnected nature of all living things. As Travis points out, the natural world is a delicate ecosystem in which every creature, no matter how small, plays its part: if mice die out, then foxes will die; if foxes die, lions will starve; if lions die out, vultures and insects that feed on a lion’s carcase will eventually go too.

And mankind is not separate from this ecosystem: if these animals did not exist in a particular part of the world, then early man, who relied on them for food (by hunting them, of course: a significant detail given the plot of ‘A Sound of Thunder’), would starve too. And that man might be the progenitor of men and women whose descendants are the very characters in the story, Eckels and Travis, or – as is implied at the end of the story – the nameless man at the front desk.

Even societal and political developments might end up taking a different path: in the election, although the more reasonable and moderate Keith won, the totalitarian Deutscher has won when they return to the altered future. (It’s worth bearing in mind that Bradbury’s story was first published just seven years after the end of the Second World War.

‘Deutscher’ summons ‘Deutschland’, the German name for Germany, and thus suggests the Nazis who had recently been defeated in the war.) With this in mind, one wonders what the ‘chemical taint’ in the air is when the men return to their present. Acid rain? Or the fallout from nuclear war?

Indeed, although the term ‘butterfly effect’ was named for the delicate but profound effects of a butterfly in the Amazon rainforest flapping its wings, it can obviously be retrospectively applied to the plot of ‘A Sound of Thunder’. (The expression ‘butterfly effect’ stemmed from a poetic metaphor for Chaos theory used by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960s.)

The ‘ripple effect’ (as it’s also known) shows how delicately everything is related, so that if you remove one element, one single creature, the course of evolution, or the development of an ecosystem, could be radically transformed.

‘A Sound of Thunder’ is a masterly piece of storytelling, but Bradbury’s use of metaphor throughout is also highly effective. Consider the way that phrase, ‘a sound of thunder’, is applied both to the sound made by the Tyrannosaurus rex as it storms through the prehistoric landscape, and the sound made by Travis’ gun when he kills Eckels at the end of the story.

Bradbury applies the term ‘thunder’ to the Tyrannosaurus several times (curiously, another well-known dinosaur, the so-called Brontosaurus, has a name that literally means ‘thunder lizard’, from the thunderous sound made by the great hulking reptiles), but the last line of the story is the first time he applies ‘thunder’ to the sound of a man’s gun. Indeed, when the men shoot at the Tyrannosaurus rex, we are told that the sound of their rifles was ‘lost in shriek and lizard thunder’.

But in their future day, the killing, not of the Tyrannosaurus rex but of the little butterfly has brought out a tyrannical side to man in the future, with America ruled by an actual tyrant or dictator (‘Tyrannosaurus’ means ‘tyrant lizard’, from its dominant size; now, in the future, men are being dominated by a fascist tyrant in the White House).

Although Bradbury’s story is about the way the seemingly small matter of the butterfly’s demise actually has momentous implications for the natural world, the emphasis is, ultimately, just as much on the socio-political changes wrought by Eckels’ clumsiness.

And whilst it may be too much of an interpretive stretch to extrapolate from Eckels’ panic in the face of the mighty T-rex and suggest that one moral of ‘A Sound of Thunder’ is ‘fear breeds tyranny’, it is nevertheless significant that it is not Eckels’ wilfulness that leads to his chaotic destruction, but his blind panic.

1 thought on “A Summary and Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder’”

I’m a big fan of Bradbury, so thanks for this analysis. Hope you can analyse more of his short stories:)

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"A Sound of Thunder": Ray Bradbury's Famous Science Fiction Story; Dubious Film

" A Sound of Thunder ,"a science fiction short story by  Ray Bradbury , was first published in  Collier's  magazine in June 28, 1952, and was very widely reprinted for decades. The story was based on the idea of the  butterfly effect , in which a very small event could cause a major change in the outcome of later events. Bradbury's story, set in 2055, concerned the use of a time machine to travel back into the very distant past. In the story the killing of a butterfly during the time of dinosaurs caused the future to change in subtle, but meaningful ways. For those of us who sometimes wonder what might have happened had this or that event been a little different, this story may have special interest.

Here is a radio adaptation of the story:

In 2004 Bradbury's story was made into a feature film with the same title . Why the distinguished actor  Ben Kingsley  accepted a leading role in this questionable film remains unclear. The film was widely panned by critics and viewers, and bombed at the box office, but I found it amusing enough to include this in the database:

Timeline Themes

A Sound of Thunder

Ray bradbury, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

In “A Sound of Thunder,” Ray Bradbury imagines a world in which humanity can take touristic journeys back in time. As Eckels , a man on a prehistoric hunting trip, discovers, however, even the slightest alteration to the past can forever alter the course of history; after accidentally crushing a butterfly underfoot 65 million years ago, Eckels returns to a present drastically different from the one he’d initially left behind. Small actions can have major repercussions, and, as with much of Bradbury's work, the tale condemns the hubristic use of increasingly powerful technology in a world that human beings do not fully understand. By emphasizing the drastic effects of something as seemingly mundane as crushing a butterfly eons in the past, the story suggests the intimate connection between the past, present, and future, and ultimately argues that every action, no matter how small, has consequences.

The company offering the time travel experiences, Time Safari, Inc., at first seems to understand the dangers of altering the past, as is evidenced by the precautions and warnings given to potential travelers. The company emphasizes that it does not guarantee any particular outcome—not even its clients’ safe return. Before setting off, Eckels has to sign a release of all liability, which the company’s agent explains in terms of danger during the safari: “Those dinosaurs are hungry.” The company has also set up anti-gravity pathways to prevent safari goers from interacting with the world around them and pre-selected dinosaurs that would have naturally died within minutes of being shot by time-traveling hunters anyway.

Mr. Travis , Eckels’s guide, explains the theory behind the company’s many safety precautions to ensure minimal effects on the past from their safaris. At such a great distance into the past, he says, tiny shifts could snowball over time and have a huge impact on human civilization. Things that seem small to Mr. Eckels because they have little impact in an ordinary human lifetime, such as stepping on a mouse or a plant, could mean much more when the time scale of their consequences is millions of years.

Nonetheless, there are penalties in place for the possibility that someone might go off the path—suggesting that the company’s precautions are not as failsafe as they should be, given its alleged appreciation of the danger of altering the past. While the company can account for some causes that might lead to changes in the past, and therefore the present and future, it overestimates its ability to control events and overlooks the ever-present element of chance. For example, when the dinosaur frightens Eckels, he does not have the presence of mind to follow instructions and return to the time machine. Instead, he wanders off the path, and the safari guides do not notice until the damage is already done.

Bradbury seems to thus be presenting a sort of naïveté on the part of humankind; the company paradoxically articulates the immense danger of changing the past in any way, yet also foolishly believes in its own ability to safeguard against such changes. Mr. Travis admits, “Maybe Time can’t be changed by us […] We don’t know. We’re guessing.” The precautions taken by Time Safaris, Inc., then, are based on an incomplete understanding of what time travel technology can do. This element of uncertainty gives the scenario a hint of recklessness, as human beings are meddling with powers they do not fully understand.

Even the smallest slip-up proves enough to set a cascade of historical changes in motion. When Eckels wanders off the path, he does little more than trample a few plants and step on a butterfly. This tiny act of destruction, however, sets in motion a total political upheaval and even changes to the English language back in the year 2055. The first hint that Eckels sees is the sign in the Time Safaris, Inc. office, which now reads “TYME SEFARI INC.” He quickly discovers that the changes go much deeper than simple spelling, this time with an ironic twist. When Eckels first arrived in the office, he joked with the company’s agent about the possibility of wanting to escape the present if Deutscher rather than Keith had won the election. Upon returning, he finds that his trip to the past has caused Deutscher to win after all.

The plot of “A Sound of Thunder” hinges on the idea that the relation between cause and effect is far more complex than humans might like to think. Bradbury uses the conventions of science fiction to explore the consequences of using technology without fully understanding it. His story anticipates a future when humans will be able to meddle with history, and demonstrates how futile and and misguided such an effort would be. Bradbury urges readers to raise the question of whether some technological advances serve only to facilitate human hubris.

Cause and Effect ThemeTracker

Cause and Effect Quotes in A Sound of Thunder

Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning.

Not knowing it, we might kill an important animal, a small bird, a roach, a flower even, thus destroying an important link in a growing species. […] The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through time, to their very foundations.

“It can’t be killed.” Eckels pronounced this verdict quietly, as if there could be no argument. He had weighed the evidence and this was his considered opinion. The rifle in his hands seemed a cap gun. “We were fools to come. This is impossible.” […] Eckels, not looking back, walked blindly to the edge of the Path, his gun limp in his arms, stepped off the Path, and walked, not knowing it, in the jungle.

We can’t take a trophy back to the Future. The body has to stay right here where it would have died originally, so the insects, birds, and bacteria can get at it, as they were intended to. Everything in balance

This ruins us! We’ll forfeit! Thousands of dollars of insurance! We guarantee no one leaves the Path. He left it. Oh, the fool! I’ll have to report to the government. They might revoke our licence to travel. Who knows wha t he’s done to Time, to History!

Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling. “No, it can’t be. Not a little thing like that. No!”

Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead.

“Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!” cried Eckels.

“Who won the presidential election yesterday?”

The man behind the desk laughed. “You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!”

… “can’t we take it back , can’t we make it alive again? Can’t we start over? Can’t we—”

He did not move. Eyes shut, he waited, shivering. He heard Travis breathe loud in the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon.

There was a sound of thunder.

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

A Sound of Thunder

A single mistake in the past, by a time travel company in the future, has devastating and unforeseen consequences. A single mistake in the past, by a time travel company in the future, has devastating and unforeseen consequences. A single mistake in the past, by a time travel company in the future, has devastating and unforeseen consequences.

• Peter Hyams
• Ray Bradbury
• Thomas Dean Donnelly
• Joshua Oppenheimer
• Edward Burns
• Ben Kingsley
• Catherine McCormack
• 360 User reviews
• 84 Critic reviews
• 24 Metascore
• 4 nominations

• Travis Ryer

• Charles Hatton
• (as Sir Ben Kingsley)

• John Wallenbeck
• (as Armin Rhode)

• Alicia Wallenbeck

• Jenny Krase

• Marcus Payne

• Clay Derris
• Young Technician
• George the Doorman

• Christian Middleton
• Newswoman on TV
• (as Nikita Le Spinasse)

• (as Scott Bellefeuille)

• Chinese Man I
• Chinese Man II
• (as Chou Ho Hon)
• Taxi Driver
• (as Antonín Hausknecht)
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia One major reason for this movie's long delay is that the original production company went bankrupt during post-production, and there simply wasn't money to finish the movie.
• Goofs The men go back in time 65 million years, where they are attacked by an Allosaurus. However, Allosaurus lived during the Jurassic Period, which ended 145 million years ago.

Sonia Rand : I don't have time for stupid idiots.

Travis Ryer : Well, why don't you make some time. How about we stop with the insults, because it is starting to get on my nerves.

Sonia Rand : You think I devoted my career to designing an amusement park ride for rich men to compensate for their little willies by shooting prehistoric animals, is that what you really think?

Travis Ryer : No, what I think is that if you were a guy, someone would have probably knocked you on your ass a long time ago.

• Crazy credits Opening Card: In the year 2055, A new technology was invented that could change the world... or destroy it. a man named Charles Hatton used it to make money.
• Alternate versions For the Dutch DVD release the aspect ratio was changed from 2,35:1 to 1,78:1.
• Connections Featured in Troldspejlet: Episode #34.8 (2006)

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 50 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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The Physics of Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"

In Ray Bradbury’s vision, reality was a fabric so delicate that the crushing of a butterfly could ripple up through 65 million years to change the results of an election. Bradbury painted that scenario in his 1952 story, “A Sound of Thunder.” When Bradbury died this month at the age of 91, more than half the time had elapsed between the writing of the story and the futuristic date in which it was set. In the intervening 60 years, physicists have reconsidered our understanding of time and the plausibility of Bradbury’s classic tale.

In Ray Bradbury's vision, reality was a fabric so delicate that the crushing of a butterfly could ripple up through 65 million years to change the results of an election.

Bradbury painted that scenario in his 1952 story, "A Sound of Thunder." The butterfly was victim of a misstep by a big game hunter who travelled back in time to pursue the thundering prize known as tyrannosaurus Rex.

The dinosaur had been fated to die, but the insect's untimely demise had haunting consequences that confronted the hunter upon his return to his departure date of 2055. Not only did he learn that a more dictatorial candidate had won a recent election, but nothing was quite the same, including written English. A sign read: SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST. YU NAIM THE ANIMALL. WEE TAEK YU THAIR.YU SHOOT ITT.

When Bradbury died this month at the age of 91, more than half the time had elapsed between the writing of the story and the futuristic date in which it was set. In the intervening 60 years, physicists have reconsidered our understanding of time and the plausibility of Bradbury's classic tale.

"The story is interesting because of the whole concept of changing history, and that tiny change in the past could have enormous repercussions in the future," said physicist Paul Halpern , who discusses the story in a Nature of Time class he teaches at the University of the Sciences. "This idea that reality is so fragile and just a very slight tweak will lead to big differences—that's connected to chaos theory," said Halpern, whose newest book "The Edge of the Universe" is coming out this fall.

The term, "The Butterfly Effect" is often connected to Bradbury's story, Halpern said, but the phrase originated with meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who proposed in the 1960s that the beat of a butterfly's wings on one side of the world would eventually cause a storm on the other. This was meant to illustrate chaos theory and the impossibility of predicting the weather more than a few days or weeks in advance.

Chaos theory is well accepted in scientific circles, at least when time goes the expected direction, but in the Bradbury story, time travel led to two contradictory versions of reality following the butterfly's death.

Physicists disagree on whether someone travelling into the past could have any impact on the unfolding of events, said Halpern. "A lot of physicists say there has to be some self-consistency." Like other time travel tales, Thunder raises some serious questions about the nature of time, such as why it has a direction at all, why it seems to be ripping along like a tidal current, and whether we can get out.

For Caltech physicist Sean Carroll , the arrow of time is defined by the irreversible progression from order to disorder, which manifests itself in such mundane events as a glass breaking, an egg scrambling or cream dispersing into coffee. If you ran a film of any of those processes in reverse, they would look improbable if not impossible.

Carroll, author of a popular book on time called From Eternity to Here, says he believes erosion of order—technically an increase in entropy—underlies the arrow of time. Entropy, he believes, separates the past from the future. But there's no widespread agreement on that idea yet.

"Does entropy increase with time or does it make time?" asked Drexel University physicist David Goldberg , author of  A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty . The inexorable increase in entropy is labeled the second law of thermodynamics, but Goldberg thinks since it's statistical in nature, it's more like a really good suggestion.

Despite the way disorder is dragging us unwittingly into the future, Caltech's Carroll said there are no laws of physics that absolutely rule out a trip into the past. "If Newton had been right about space and time, then time travel would be impossible." But Einstein's theory of general relativity allow space and time to act like a fabric that can curve and loop back around on itself. Some particularly convoluted routes through space-time can, in theory, lead you to a time before you left.

But whether you can actually have any influence on events is another matter, he said, on which physics is frustratingly vague. You can't create a paradox, by, say, going back and killing one of your parents so that you could never have been born.

There is one possible loophole, the physicists say. That's the notion that if you change something in the past, you create a fork in the road of time and a new universe branches off in which the consequences of the crushed butterfly play themselves out.

That idea, said Halpern, is a consequence of what's called the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum physics—a view that allows different versions of reality to branch off like twigs on an a tree. If that's the case, you could kill or parents before you were born or otherwise prevent your birth and that would create a new branch of the universe in which you don't exist. Of course, you'd have to return to the universe in which you do exist.

Drexel's Goldberg warns that there's no evidence these other universes exist or that if they did exist, we could get there from here. He suspects there's just one reality. When the dinosaur hunter stepped on that butterfly, the act would necessarily be part of the one and only history of time. There would always be tracks or some other sign that a time traveler had always crushed the butterfly. There would be no reality in which the unfortunate creature got to live any longer.

That was how writers of the original Terminator movie envisioned time travel, Goldberg said. The time travelling rescuer, Kyle Reese, had to save Sarah Connor so that her son would be born—and Reese also fathered the son—but all this had to happen to create the destiny that led to the existence of the time travelers in the first place. In this view, history is painted on a stiffer canvas.

"To be fair, this is a matter of belief," he said, "But it's a belief that's informed by the laws of physics that we know." In other words, these guys aren't blindly guessing, but they're out far enough on the frontier of knowledge that respectable physicists can agree to disagree. If there's only one universe and you can't change the present from the past, then how can we change the future in the present? This raises the contentious possibility that we can't. Goldberg says this may be the way it is. Others see loopholes that would allow us to have the kind of free will we seem to be experiencing. "The right way to think about the future is that it's changeable," said Carroll.

Arguments against free will often invoke determinism: The idea that if we know where everything is, the laws of physics determine where everything is going.  Carroll says it's impossible to know exactly where every particle is at any given time, and this impossibility saves us from the fatalistic idea that our futures have already been written.

In Bradbury's story, Carroll thought it more likely that tweaking reality 65 million years ago would either have no effect, or the ripples would have grown so large that all civilization would be different, or perhaps humanity wouldn't have evolved at all. But all agree that nobody knows for sure. The questions Bradbury raised about time remain unresolved. And so A Sound of Thunder remains provocative and influential, and its impact will send ripples through time for decades to come.

A Sound Of Thunder

The short story A Sound of Thunder involves a Time Travel Safari where rich businessmen pay to travel back to prehistoric times and hunt real live dinosaurs.

A Sound Of Thunder by Ray Bradbury

The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water. Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and the sign burned in this momentary darkness:

TIME SAFARI, INC. SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST. YOU NAME THE ANIMAL. WE TAKE YOU THERE. YOU SHOOT IT.

“Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?”

“We guarantee nothing,” said the official, “except the dinosaurs.” He turned. “This is Mr. Travis, your Safari Guide in the Past. He’ll tell you what and where to shoot. If he says no shooting, no shooting. If you disobey instructions, there’s a stiff penalty of another ten thousand dollars, plus possible government action, on your return.”

Eckels glanced across the vast office at a mass and tangle, a snaking and humming of wires and steel boxes, at an aurora that flickered now orange, now silver, now blue. There was a sound like a gigantic bonfire burning all of Time, all the years and all the parchment calendars, all the hours piled high and set aflame.

A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand.

“Unbelievable.” Eckels breathed, the light of the Machine on his thin face. “A real Time Machine.” He shook his head. “Makes you think, If the election had gone badly yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results. Thank God Keith won. He’ll make a fine President of the United States.”

“Yes,” said the man behind the desk. “We’re lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in, we’d have the worst kind of dictatorship. There’s an anti everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they wanted to go live in 1492. Of course it’s not our business to conduct Escapes, but to form Safaris. Anyway, Keith’s President now. All you got to worry about is-”

“Shooting my dinosaur,” Eckels finished it for him.

“A Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Tyrant Lizard, the most incredible monster in history. Sign this release. Anything happens to you, we’re not responsible. Those dinosaurs are hungry.”

Eckels flushed angrily. “Trying to scare me!”

“Frankly, yes. We don’t want anyone going who’ll panic at the first shot. Six Safari leaders were killed last year, and a dozen hunters. We’re here to give you the severest thrill a real hunter ever asked for. Traveling you back sixty million years to bag the biggest game in all of Time. Your personal check’s still there. Tear it up.” Mr. Eckels looked at the check. His fingers twitched.

“Good luck,” said the man behind the desk. “Mr. Travis, he’s all yours.”

First a day and then a night and then a day and then a night, then it was day-night-day-night. A week, a month, a year, a decade! A.D. 2055. A.D. 2019. 1999! 1957! Gone! The Machine roared.

They put on their oxygen helmets and tested the intercoms.

Eckels swayed on the padded seat, his face pale, his jaw stiff. He felt the trembling in his arms and he looked down and found his hands tight on the new rifle. There were four other men in the Machine. Travis, the Safari Leader, his assistant, Lesperance, and two other hunters, Billings and Kramer. They sat looking at each other, and the years blazed around them.

“Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?” Eckels felt his mouth saying.

“If you hit them right,” said Travis on the helmet radio. “Some dinosaurs have two brains, one in the head, another far down the spinal column. We stay away from those. That’s stretching luck. Put your first two shots into the eyes, if you can, blind them, and go back into the brain.”

The Machine howled. Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them. “Think,” said Eckels. “Every hunter that ever lived would envy us today. This makes Africa seem like Illinois.”

The Machine slowed; its scream fell to a murmur. The Machine stopped.

The sun stopped in the sky.

The fog that had enveloped the Machine blew away and they were in an old time, a very old time indeed, three hunters and two Safari Heads with their blue metal guns across their knees.

“Christ isn’t born yet,” said Travis, “Moses has not gone to the mountains to talk with God. The Pyramids are still in the earth, waiting to be cut out and put up. Remember that. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler – none of them exists.” The man nodded. “That” – Mr. Travis pointed – “is the jungle of sixty million two thousand and fifty-five years before President Keith.”

He indicated a metal path that struck off into green wilderness, over streaming swamp, among giant ferns and palms.

“And that,” he said, “is the Path, laid by Time Safari for your use. It floats six inches above the earth. Doesn’t touch so much as one grass blade, flower, or tree. It’s an anti-gravity metal. Its purpose is to keep you from touching this world of the past in any way. Stay on the Path. Don’t go off it. I repeat. Don’t go off. For any reason! If you fall off, there’s a penalty. And don’t shoot any animal we don’t okay.”

“Why?” asked Eckels.

They sat in the ancient wilderness. Far birds’ cries blew on a wind, and the smell of tar and an old salt sea, moist grasses, and flowers the color of blood.

“We don’t want to change the Future. We don’t belong here in the Past. The government doesn’t like us here. We have to pay big graft to keep our franchise. A Time Machine is finicky business. Not knowing it, we might kill an important animal, a small bird, a roach, a flower even, thus destroying an important link in a growing species.”

“That’s not clear,” said Eckels.

“Right.”

“And all the families of the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!”

“So they’re dead,” said Eckels. “So what?”

“So what?” Travis snorted quietly. “Well, what about the foxes that’ll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber-toothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the caveman starves. And the caveman, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life. It is comparable to slaying some of Adam’s grandchildren. The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations. With the death of that one caveman, a billion others yet unborn are throttled in the womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step on a mouse and you crush the Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a Grand Canyon, across Eternity. Queen Elizabeth might never be born, Washington might not cross the Delaware, there might never be a United States at all. So be careful. Stay on the Path. Never step off!”

“I see,” said Eckels. “Then it wouldn’t pay for us even to touch the grass?”

“Correct. Crushing certain plants could add up infinitesimally. A little error here would multiply in sixty million years, all out of proportion. Of course maybe our theory is wrong. Maybe Time can’t be changed by us. Or maybe it can be changed only in little subtle ways. A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a population disproportion later, a bad harvest further on, a depression, mass starvation, and finally, a change in social temperament in far-flung countries. Something much more subtle, like that. Perhaps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn’t see it. Who knows? Who really can say he knows? We don’t know. We’re guessing. But until we do know for certain whether our messing around in Time can make a big roar or a little rustle in history, we’re being careful. This Machine, this Path, your clothing and bodies, were sterilized, as you know, before the journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can’t introduce our bacteria into an ancient atmosphere.”

“How do we know which animals to shoot?”

“They’re marked with red paint,” said Travis. “Today, before our journey, we sent Lesperance here back with the Machine. He came to this particular era and followed certain animals.”

“Studying them?”

“Right,” said Lesperance. “I track them through their entire existence, noting which of them lives longest. Very few. How many times they mate. Not often. Life’s short, When I find one that’s going to die when a tree falls on him, or one that drowns in a tar pit, I note the exact hour, minute, and second. I shoot a paint bomb. It leaves a red patch on his side. We can’t miss it. Then I correlate our arrival in the Past so that we meet the Monster not more than two minutes before he would have died anyway. This way, we kill only animals with no future, that are never going to mate again. You see how careful we are?”

“But if you came back this morning in Time,” said Eckels eagerly, you must’ve bumped into us, our Safari! How did it turn out? Was it successful? Did all of us get through – alive?”

Travis and Lesperance gave each other a look.

“That’d be a paradox,” said the latter. “Time doesn’t permit that sort of mess-a man meeting himself. When such occasions threaten, Time steps aside. Like an airplane hitting an air pocket. You felt the Machine jump just before we stopped? That was us passing ourselves on the way back to the Future. We saw nothing. There’s no way of telling if this expedition was a success, if we got our monster, or whether all of us – meaning you, Mr. Eckels – got out alive.”

Eckels smiled palely.

“Cut that,” said Travis sharply. “Everyone on his feet!”

They were ready to leave the Machine.

The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire world forever and forever. Sounds like music and sounds like flying tents filled the sky, and those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous gray wings, gigantic bats of delirium and night fever.

Eckels, balanced on the narrow Path, aimed his rifle playfully.

“Stop that!” said Travis. “Don’t even aim for fun, blast you! If your guns should go off – ”

Eckels flushed. “Where’s our Tyrannosaurus?”

Lesperance checked his wristwatch. “Up ahead, We’ll bisect his trail in sixty seconds. Look for the red paint! Don’t shoot till we give the word. Stay on the Path. Stay on the Path!”

They moved forward in the wind of morning.

“Strange,” murmured Eckels. “Up ahead, sixty million years, Election Day over. Keith made President. Everyone celebrating. And here we are, a million years lost, and they don’t exist. The things we worried about for months, a lifetime, not even born or thought of yet.”

“Safety catches off, everyone!” ordered Travis. “You, first shot, Eckels. Second, Billings, Third, Kramer.”

“I’ve hunted tiger, wild boar, buffalo, elephant, but now, this is it,” said Eckels. “I’m shaking like a kid.”

“Ah,” said Travis.

Everyone stopped.

Travis raised his hand. “Ahead,” he whispered. “In the mist. There he is. There’s His Royal Majesty now.”

Suddenly it all ceased, as if someone had shut a door.

A sound of thunder.

Out of the mist, one hundred yards away, came Tyrannosaurus Rex.

“It,” whispered Eckels. “It……

“Sh!”

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight.

It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit area warily, its beautifully reptilian hands feeling the air.

“Why, why,” Eckels twitched his mouth. “It could reach up and grab the moon.”

“Sh!” Travis jerked angrily. “He hasn’t seen us yet.”

“It can’t be killed,” Eckels pronounced this verdict quietly, as if there could be no argument. He had weighed the evidence and this was his considered opinion. The rifle in his hands seemed a cap gun. “We were fools to come. This is impossible.”

“Shut up!” hissed Travis.

“Nightmare.”

“Turn around,” commanded Travis. “Walk quietly to the Machine. We’ll remit half your fee.”

“It sees us!”

“There’s the red paint on its chest!”

The Tyrant Lizard raised itself. Its armored flesh glittered like a thousand green coins. The coins, crusted with slime, steamed. In the slime, tiny insects wriggled, so that the entire body seemed to twitch and undulate, even while the monster itself did not move. It exhaled. The stink of raw flesh blew down the wilderness.

“Get me out of here,” said Eckels. “It was never like this before. I was always sure I’d come through alive. I had good guides, good safaris, and safety. This time, I figured wrong. I’ve met my match and admit it. This is too much for me to get hold of.”

“Don’t run,” said Lesperance. “Turn around. Hide in the Machine.”

“Yes.” Eckels seemed to be numb. He looked at his feet as if trying to make them move. He gave a grunt of helplessness.

“Eckels!”

He took a few steps, blinking, shuffling.

“Not that way!”

The rifles cracked again, Their sound was lost in shriek and lizard thunder. The great level of the reptile’s tail swung up, lashed sideways. Trees exploded in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweler’s hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat. Its boulderstone eyes leveled with the men. They saw themselves mirrored. They fired at the metallic eyelids and the blazing black iris.

Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, Tyrannosaurus fell.

Thundering, it clutched trees, pulled them with it. It wrenched and tore the metal Path. The men flung themselves back and away. The body hit, ten tons of cold flesh and stone. The guns fired. The Monster lashed its armored tail, twitched its snake jaws, and lay still. A fount of blood spurted from its throat. Somewhere inside, a sac of fluids burst. Sickening gushes drenched the hunters. They stood, red and glistening.

The jungle was silent. After the avalanche, a green peace. After the nightmare, morning.

Billings and Kramer sat on the pathway and threw up. Travis and Lesperance stood with smoking rifles, cursing steadily. In the Time Machine, on his face, Eckels lay shivering. He had found his way back to the Path, climbed into the Machine.

Travis came walking, glanced at Eckels, took cotton gauze from a metal box, and returned to the others, who were sitting on the Path.

“Clean up.”

They wiped the blood from their helmets. They began to curse too. The Monster lay, a hill of solid flesh. Within, you could hear the sighs and murmurs as the furthest chambers of it died, the organs malfunctioning, liquids running a final instant from pocket to sac to spleen, everything shutting off, closing up forever. It was like standing by a wrecked locomotive or a steam shovel at quitting time, all valves being released or levered tight. Bones cracked; the tonnage of its own flesh, off balance, dead weight, snapped the delicate forearms, caught underneath. The meat settled, quivering.

Another cracking sound. Overhead, a gigantic tree branch broke from its heavy mooring, fell. It crashed upon the dead beast with finality.

“There.” Lesperance checked his watch. “Right on time. That’s the giant tree that was scheduled to fall and kill this animal originally.” He glanced at the two hunters. “You want the trophy picture?”

“What?”

“We can’t take a trophy back to the Future. The body has to stay right here where it would have died originally, so the insects, birds, and bacteria can get at it, as they were intended to. Everything in balance. The body stays. But we can take a picture of you standing near it.”

The two men tried to think, but gave up, shaking their heads.

They let themselves be led along the metal Path. They sank wearily into the Machine cushions. They gazed back at the ruined Monster, the stagnating mound, where already strange reptilian birds and golden insects were busy at the steaming armor. A sound on the floor of the Time Machine stiffened them. Eckels sat there, shivering.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last.

“Get up!” cried Travis.

Eckels got up.

“Go out on that Path alone,” said Travis. He had his rifle pointed, “You’re not coming back in the Machine. We’re leaving you here!”

Lesperance seized Travis’s arm. “Wait – ”

“Stay out of this!” Travis shook his hand away. “This fool nearly killed us. But it isn’t that so much, no. It’s his shoes! Look at them! He ran off the Path. That ruins us! We’ll forfeit! Thousands of dollars of insurance! We guarantee no one leaves the Path. He left it. Oh, the fool! I’ll have to report to the government. They might revoke our license to travel. Who knows what he’s done to Time, to History!”

“Take it easy, all he did was kick up some dirt.”

“How do we know?” cried Travis. “We don’t know anything! It’s all a mystery! Get out of here, Eckels!”

Eckels fumbled his shirt. “I’ll pay anything. A hundred thousand dollars!”

Travis glared at Eckels’ checkbook and spat. “Go out there. The Monster’s next to the Path. Stick your arms up to your elbows in his mouth. Then you can come back with us.”

“That’s unreasonable!”

“The Monster’s dead, you idiot. The bullets! The bullets can’t be left behind. They don’t belong in the Past; they might change anything. Here’s my knife. Dig them out!”

The jungle was alive again, full of the old tremorings and bird cries. Eckels turned slowly to regard the primeval garbage dump, that hill of nightmares and terror. After a long time, like a sleepwalker he shuffled out along the Path.

He returned, shuddering, five minutes later, his arms soaked and red to the elbows. He held out his hands. Each held a number of steel bullets. Then he fell. He lay where he fell, not moving.

“Didn’t I? It’s too early to tell.” Travis nudged the still body. “He’ll live. Next time he won’t go hunting game like this. Okay.” He jerked his thumb wearily at Lesperance. “Switch on. Let’s go home.”

1492. 1776. 1812.

They cleaned their hands and faces. They changed their caking shirts and pants. Eckels was up and around again, not speaking. Travis glared at him for a full ten minutes.

“Don’t look at me,” cried Eckels. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Who can tell?”

“Just ran off the Path, that’s all, a little mud on my shoes-what do you want me to do-get down and pray?”

“We might need it. I’m warning you, Eckels, I might kill you yet. I’ve got my gun ready.”

“I’m innocent. I’ve done nothing!”

1999.2000.2055.

The Machine stopped.

“Get out,” said Travis.

The room was there as they had left it. But not the same as they had left it. The same man sat behind the same desk. But the same man did not quite sit behind the same desk. Travis looked around swiftly. “Everything okay here?” he snapped.

“Fine. Welcome home!”

Travis did not relax. He seemed to be looking through the one high window.

“Okay, Eckels, get out. Don’t ever come back.” Eckels could not move.

“You heard me,” said Travis. “What’re you staring at?”

Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were . . . were . . . . And there was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was not quite the same man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk . . . lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now, there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind ….

But the immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same sign he had read earlier today on first entering. Somehow, the sign had changed:

TYME SEFARI INC. SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST. YU NAIM THE ANIMALL. WEE TAEK YU THAIR. YU SHOOT ITT.

Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling, “No, it can’t be. Not a little thing like that. No!”

Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead.

“Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!” cried Eckels.

It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels’ mind whirled. It couldn’t change things. Killing one butterfly couldn’t be that important! Could it?

His face was cold. His mouth trembled, asking: “Who – who won the presidential election yesterday?”

The man behind the desk laughed. “You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!” The official stopped. “What’s wrong?”

Eckels moaned. He dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fingers. “Can’t we,” he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, “can’t we take it back, can’t we make it alive again? Can’t we start over? Can’t we – ”

There was a sound of thunder.

A Sound Of Thunder Analysis

Originally published in the June 28 1952 edition of Collier’s magazine, Bradbury’s seminal tale of a hunting safari sent back in time to kill a dinosaur has been reprinted more than two dozen times in collections and anthologies. A film adaptation of Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder features Ed Burns as Travis Ryer, the leader of the safari and Ben Kingsley as Charles Hatton the owner of the safari company.

The encounter with the Tyrannosaurus forms the heart of the story with Bradbury’s eloquent prose transporting the reader along with the hunting expedition sixty-million years into the past.

Bradbury’s tale serves not only to entertain but also to speculate on the dangers of time travel. His illustration of a ripple effect on the timeline caused by a seemingly unrelated events over a long period of time is not only demonstrated by the climax of the story, but is also explained in the context of the story. The following passage is an exchange between Travis, the leader of the safari and Eckels one of the businessmen.

While Bradbury does an excellent job illustrating the point, he tends to over simplify the ripple effect since he assumes the timeline to be static and that by removing the mouse from the equation a void is created that multiplies up the timeline. It seems more likely that true effect might be equally as dramatic, but unfolding over time in a much more dynamic way. Using Bradbury’s example a lack of mice might mean something other than the fox evolves and thrives on the land, or perhaps the fox adapts to another food source altogether.

The climax of the story involves the return of the hunting party to the office of Time Safari Inc. which still oddly enough still exists, but the language has evolved differently.

More importantly they discover that the presidential election has been influenced and that the fascist candidate Deutscher was elected president instead of the moderate candidate.

While dramatically effective, the ending virtually contradicts Bradbury’s earlier example of the ripple effect and the mouse. The ending suggests that while the players remain the same, namely the presidential candidates Keith and Deutscher, that their environment and the evolution of the human language has been influenced.

It’s an interesting coincidence that Bradbury chose a butterfly to symbolize the chaotic effect multiplied over time. The term Butterfly Effect did not originate until MIT research meteorologist Edward Lorenz discovered in the early 1960s that small variations in his computer model caused wildly divergent results. Lorenz later went on to write a seminal paper on Chaos Theory based on his experience.

Bradbury’s short story also inspired The Simpsons segment Treehouse of Horror episode in a segment called “Time and Punishment” from Season 6. In the episode Homer accidently discovers time travel when he jams a fork in a broken toaster trying to fix it. Homer’s first unplanned trip to the past takes him to prehistoric times where he stomps on a bug and changes the course of history in hilarious ways.

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holy macaroni! 2007? i was 8 when this was updated, now i’m 15! crazy right? great story anyway sfk, this website should have a 10th anniversary celebration next year:D

so boooooooooooring :p

Amazing! I love this story. And I have watched the episode of The Simpsons, and was thinking about that while reading this story. Nothing more to say except that the story is awesome. :)

Nice another 2007.

And also, no offense, I’m just saying, but dang, this one old website… I mean the oldest story I have read on this website is like 7 years old! But I still love you ScaryForKids!!! :) :) :) :) :)

This story was posted on here in 2007, when I was like 6 years old! OMG! this is so weird!!! I mean, this story has been on here for 7 YEARS but no one but me read it yet!?!!?! i’m so proud!

Also, the story was REALLY interesting…I like science fictiony stories.. especially ones that have dinosaurs in them… i’m a science freak so I love stuff like this…

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March 29, 2018

Would stepping on the first butterfly really change the history of evolution?

by Jordi Paps, The Conversation

Martha Jones: It's like in those films: if you step on a butterfly, you change the future of the human race.

The Doctor: Then don't step on any butterflies. What have butterflies ever done to you?

Science fiction writers can't seem to agree on the rules of time travel. Sometimes, as in Doctor Who (above), characters can travel in time and affect small events without appearing to alter the grand course of history. In other stories, such as Back To The Future, even the tiniest of the time travellers' actions in the past produce major ripples that unpredictably change the future.

Evolutionary biologists have been holding a similar debate about how evolution works for decades. In 1989 (the year of Back To The Future Part II), the American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould published his timeless book Wonderful Life, named after the classic movie that also involves time travel of sorts. In it, he proposed a thought experiment: what would happen if you could replay life's tape, rewinding the history of evolution and running it again? Would you still see the same movie with all the evolutionary events playing out as before? Or would it be more like a reboot, with species evolving in different ways?

Gould's answer was the latter. In his view, unpredictable events played a major role in natural history. If you were to travel back in time and step on the first butterfly (reminiscent of the 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury), then butterflies wouldn't evolve ever again.

This is supposedly because the variation we see in nature—the many different physical features and forms of behaviour that lifeforms can have – is caused by random genetic events, such as genetic mutations and recombination . Natural selection filters this variation, preserving and spreading the features that give organisms the best reproductive advantage. In Gould's view, because the series of mutations that led to the first butterfly were random, they would be unlikely to occur a second time.

Convergent evolution

But not everyone agrees with this picture. Some scientists defend the idea of " convergent evolution ". This is when organisms that aren't related to each other independently evolve similar features in response to their environment. For example, bats and whales are very different animals, but both have evolved the ability to "see" by listening to how sound echoes around them ( echolocation ). Both pandas and humans have evolved opposable thumbs . Powered flying has evolved at least four times , in birds, bats, pterosaurs, and insects like butterflies. And eyes have independently evolved at least 50 times in animal history.

Even intelligence has evolved multiple times. The famous palaeontologist Simon Conway-Morris was once asked if dinosaurs would have become intelligent if they were still here. His answer was that "the experiment has been done and we call them crows", referring to the fact that birds, including the very intelligent crow species, evolved from a group of dinosaurs.

Convergent evolution suggests that there are a few optimal ways in which species can adapt to their environment, which means that (if you have enough information) you could predict how a species is likely to evolve over a long time. If you were to step on the first butterfly, another butterfly-like insect will eventually evolve because other mutations will eventually produce the same features that will be favoured by natural selection.

A recent study in the journal Current Biology seems to tip the scale in favour of convergent evolution. This study investigates how stick spiders have evolved in the Hawaiian Islands and provides evidence for different, isolated groups of animals evolving the same features independently.

Islands are often referred to as natural laboratories because they are effectively closed environments. Every time a species colonises a new island, a new independent experiment on adaptation takes place. An iconic example is the finches that have adapted to the various food sources on each island of the Galapagos, a fact that helped Charles Darwin develop his theory of natural selection . Some of these populations have even been caught in the act of becoming new species of finch .

Most of the stick spiders on the Hawaiian Islands have gold, dark or white body colouring as camouflage to hide from predators, such as birds. The scientists used the DNA of the various spider species to reconstruct the history of how they evolved. They showed that the dark spiders and the white spiders have repeatedly evolved from ancestral gold spiders, six times in the case of the dark spiders and twice in the case of the white ones.

Chance or necessity?

This study is a remarkable example of convergent evolution taking place in the same geographical area. It's reminiscent of the classic studies on Anolis lizards by evolutionary ecologist Jonathan Losos, who noticed lizards on different Caribbean islands had independently evolved the same adaptations multiple times . All this suggests that lifeforms living in a specific environment over a long enough time period are likely to evolve certain features.

But the evidence for convergent evolution doesn't rule out the role of chance. There is no doubt that mutations and the biological variations they create are random. Organisms are a mosaic of multiple traits, each with different evolutionary histories. And that means whatever evolved in the butterfly's place might well not look exactly the same.

The evidence isn't conclusive either way, but maybe both chance and necessity play a role in evolution. If we were to run the tape of life again, I think we would end up with the same types of organisms we have today. There would probably be primary producers extracting nutrients from the soil and energy from the sun, and other organisms that move around and eat the primary producers. Many of these would have eyes, some would fly, and some would be intelligent. But they might look quite different from the plants and animals we know today. There might not even be any intelligent two-legged mammals.

So just in case you ever find yourself travelling back in time, don't step on any butterflies.

Provided by The Conversation

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Summaries, Analysis & Lists

Time Travel Short Stories: Examples Online

The short stories on this page all contain some form of time travel, including time loops. Some of them contain time machines or other technologies that makes the trip possible; in other stories the jump in time doesn’t have an obvious explanation. They don’t all involve obvious trips to the past or future. Sometimes, the story simply contains an element that is out of place in time. See also:

Short Stories About Time Travel

“caveat time traveler” by gregory benford.

The narrator spots the man from the past immediately. The visitor identifies himself. He’s surprised to find he’s not the first visitor from the past. He wants to take something back to prove he made it.

“Caveat Time Travel” can be read in the preview of  The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF.

“Absolutely Inflexible” by Robert Silverberg

A time traveler in a spacesuit sits in Mahler’s office. He’s informed that he’ll be sent to the Moon, where all visitors from the past have to go. The man tries to get out of it, but Mahler explains why no exceptions are possible.

“Absolutely Inflexible” can be read in the preview of  Time and Time Again :  Sixteen Trips in Time.

“Yesterday Was Monday” by Theodore Sturgeon

When Harry Wright wakes up on Wednesday morning he realizes that yesterday was Monday. Somehow there is a gap. He notices that his environment doesn’t quite seem complete.

“Yesterday Was Monday” can be read in the preview of  The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century.

“Death Ship” by Richard Matheson

The crew of a spaceship is collecting samples from various planets to determine their suitability for human habitation. While nearing a new planet, Mason spots a metallic flash. The crew speculates that it might be a ship. Captain Ross orders a landing to check it out.

“Death Ship” can be read in the preview of  The Time Traveler’s Almanac.

“The Third Level” by Jack Finney

The narrator has been to the third level of Grand Central Station, even though everyone else believes there are only two. He’s just an ordinary guy and doesn’t know why he discovered this unknown level. He relates how it happened.

“The Third Level” can be read in the preview of  About Time: 12 Short Stories.

“A Touch of Petulance” by Ray Bradbury

Jonathan Hughes met his fate in the form of an old man while he rode the train home from work. He noticed the old man’s newspaper looked more modern than his own. There was a story on the front page about a murdered woman—his wife. His mind raced.

This story can be read in the preview of  Killer, Come Back To Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury.

“Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving

Rip Van Winkle is lazy at home but helpful to, and well-liked by, his neighbors. He’s out in the mountains one day to get away from things. With night approaching, he starts for home but meets up with a group of men. He has something to drink and goes to sleep, which changes everything.

This story can be read in the preview of  The Big Book of Classic Fantasy .

“Twilight” by John W. Campbell

Jim picks up a hitch-hiker, Ares, who says he’s a scientist from the year 3059. He says he traveled millions of years into the future, but came back to the wrong year. Life in 3059 is trouble free, with machines taking care of everything. Future Earth is in trouble, with all life extinct, except for humans and plants.

This is the second story in the preview of  The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Vol 1 .  (49% into preview)

“The Man Who Walked Home” by James Tiptree, Jr.

An accident at the Bonneville Particle Acceleration Facility decimated the Earth’s population and severely damaged the biosphere and surface. Decades later, a huge flat creature emerges from the crater at the explosion site and promptly disappeared. There are other sightings in the years that follow.

This story can be read in the preview of the anthology  Timegates .  (18% into preview)

“An Assassin in Time” by S. A. Asthana

Navy Seal Jessica Kravitz recovers from the effects of the time jump. She’s done it before, but there are always side-effects. She’s on a highly classified, very important, and expensive mission. Previous jumps have familiarized her with the grounds. This time, she should be able to reach her target.

This story can be read in the preview of  AT THE EDGES: Short Science Fiction, Thriller and Horror Stories .  (17% in)

“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang

Fuwaad, a fabric merchant, appears before the Caliph to recount a remarkable story. While looking for a gift, he entered a large shop with a new owner. It had a marvelous assortment of offerings, all made by the owner or under his direction. Fuwaad is led into the back where he’s shown a small hoop that manipulates time. He also has a larger gateway that people can walk through. The owner tells Fuwaad the stories of a few who did just that.

This story is on the longer side but doesn’t feel like it. Most of “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” can be read in the Amazon preview of  Exhalation: Stories .

“Time Locker” by Harry Kuttner

Gallegher is a scientist—drunken, erratic and brilliant. He invents things but pays them little attention after. His acquaintance Vanning, an unscrupulous lawyer, has made use of some of these inventions, including a neuro-gun that he rents out. During a visit he sees a locker that is bigger inside than out. Fascinated with the item’s possibilities, he offers to purchase it.

Some of “Time Locker” can be read in the preview of  The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century.

Time Travel Short Stories, Cont’d

“All You Zombies” by Robert A. Heinlein

A young man explains to a bartender that he was born a girl. He (she) gave birth to a child and there were complications. The doctors noticed he (she) was a hermaphrodite and performed an emergency sex-change operation.

A lot of this story can be read in the preview of  “ All You Zombies—”: Five Classic Stories .

“The Hundred-Light-Year Diary” by Greg Egan

The narrator meets his future wife, Alison, for lunch exactly when he knew he would. His diary told him. Everyone alive is allotted a hundred words a day to send back to themselves.

Most of this story can be read in the preview of Axiomatic .  (Select Kindle first then Preview, 57% in)

“The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov

Arnold Potterley, a Professor of Ancient History, wants to use the chronoscope—the ability to view a scene from the past—for his research on Carthage. The government maintains strict control over its use, and his request is denied. Frustrated, Potterley embarks on a plan to get around this restriction, which is professionally risky.

Some of this story can be read in the preview of  The Complete Stories, Vol 1 .  (6% in)

“Signal Moon” by Kate Quinn

Working with the Royal Naval Service, Lily Baines intercepts radio communications to enemy vessels for decoding. One night, everything changes when she picks up an impossible message—a plea for help from another time.

Preview of “Signal Moon”

“Journey to the Seed” by Alejo Carpentier

An old man wanders around a demolition site, muttering a string of incomprehensible phrases. The roof has been removed and, by evening, most of the house is down. When the site is deserted, the old man waves his walking stick over a pile of discarded tiles. They fly back and cover the floor. The house continues to rebuild. Inside, Don Marcial lies on his deathbed.

“A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury

In the future, a company offers guided hunting safaris into the past to kill dinosaurs. Extreme care is taken to ensure nothing happens that could alter the present.

Read “A Sound of Thunder” (PDF Pg. 3)

“That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French” by Stephen King

Carol and Bill, married twenty-five years, are on their second honeymoon, driving to their destination. Carol experiences déjà vu; voices and images keep coming to her mind. Their drive comes to an end and she finds herself at an earlier point in their trip.

“The Clock That Went Backward” by Edward Page Mitchell

The narrator recounts the discovery surrounding a clock left to his cousin Harry by his Aunt Gertrude. As young boys they witnessed a strange event. Late one night Aunt Gertrude wound the clock, put her face to the dial, and then kissed and caressed it. The hands were moving backward. She fell to the floor when it stopped.

Read “The Clock That Went Backward” 

“Soldier (Soldier from Tomorrow)” by Harlan Ellison

Qarlo, a soldier, is fighting in the Great War VII. He doesn’t expect to be able to go back. The odds are against it. Qarlo anticipates the Regimenter’s order and gets warped off the battlefield. He’s not sure where he is but his instincts kick in.

“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester

Henry Hassel comes home to find his wife in the arms of another man. He could get his revenge immediately but he has a more intellectual plan. He gets a revolver and builds a time machine. He goes into the past.

“Cosmic Corkscrew” by Michael A. Burstein

The narrator is sent back to 1938 to make a copy of a rejected story by an unnamed writer. Unknown to Dr. Scheihagen, the narrator adjusts his arrival to three days earlier. He wants to make contact with the writer.

“Time’s Arrow” by Arthur C. Clarke

Barton and Davis, geologists, are assisting Professor Fowler with an excavation. The professor receives an invitation to visit a nearby research facility. Barton and Davis are curious to know what goes on there. The professor says he will fill them in, but after his visit he says he’s been asked not to talk about it. Henderson, from the research facility, returns the visit. Something he says starts the geologists speculating about a device that could see into the past.

“The Final Days” by David Langford

Harman and Ferris, presidential candidates, are participating in a televised debate. Ferris is struggling to connect with the audience while Harman relishes the attention. The technician signals Harman that there are fourteen watchers. His confidence increases.

Read “The Final Days”

“Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim

When Hwang is in a time he likes he tries to stay awake. Hwang jumps ahead in time when he sleeps. It could only be a few days; it could be years.

Read “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters”

“Fish Night” by Joe R. Lansdale

Two traveling salesmen, a father and son, get broke down on a desert road. They sit by the car and talk about how hard it is to make a living. The father tells his son about an unusual experience he had on the same road years ago.

Read “Fish Night”

“The Fox and the Forest” by Ray Bradbury

William and Susan Travis have gone to Mexico in 1938. They’re enjoying a local celebration. William assures Susan that they’re safe—they have traveler’s checks to last a lifetime, and he’s confident they won’t be found. Susan notices a conspicuous man in a café looking at them. She thinks he could be a Searcher, but William says he’s nobody.

“A Statue for Father” by Isaac Asimov

The narrator tells the story of his father, a theoretical physicist who researched time travel. He’s celebrated now, but it was a difficult climb. When time travel research fell out of favor, the dean forced him out. He continued the research independently with his son. Eventually, they succeed in holding a window open long enough for the son to reach in. He brings back some dinosaur eggs.

“The Pendulum” by Ray Bradbury

Layeville has been swinging in a massive glass pendulum for a long time. The people call him The Prisoner of Time. It’s his punishment for his crime. He had constructed a time machine and invited thirty of the world’s preeminent scientists to attend the unveiling.

Read  The Pendulum

“Who’s Cribbing?” by Jack Lewis

A writer has his manuscript returned by a publisher. The story he submitted was published years before—he obviously plagiarized it. They warn him against doing this again. The writer has never heard of the author who first wrote the story and claims it’s an original work.

“Who’s Cribbing” is in  Time Machines: The Best Time Travel Stories Ever Written.

I’ll keep adding short stories about time travel and time machines as I find more.

10 Great Time Travel Stories: Part I

April 6, 2016.

Time travel has intrigued people for as long as, well, time. There are no hard and fast rules, but for over a hundred years writers have given us their take on how it works. Time travel allows us to imagine what it would be like to experience other worlds and consider what we would do if we could influence history or see the future.

We’ve picked out ten great ten time travel books take us through our own time – from Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court published in 1889 to Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveler’s Wife published in 2003.

Here are the first five on our list; stay tuned next week for five more time warping classics!

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain (1889)

social satire, humor

Twain’s special gift for satire makes this story hilarious, fantastical and to the point. His comparative study and social commentary exposes his dissatisfaction of the romantic ideal of King Arthur’s world and faith in the scientific and social progress of his own time.

Twain starts by sending Hank Morgan, a self-reliant New Englander and engineer, back in time to King Arthur’s Court. Things go bad quickly and he is sentenced to death by Merlin. When Hank uses his knowledge of the nineteenth-century to save himself, he convinces the people, the King, and himself , that he is a magician greater than Merlin. He begins to transform King Arthur’s world where he transforms into the Boss.

Book eBook Audiobook

Time Machine, H.G. Wells (1895)

science fiction, fantasy, Darwinism, socialism

A forerunner of the science fiction genre, this classic novel popularized the concept of time travel and introduced the term “time machine”. Written in 1895, it is couched in a Darwinian and Socialist parable about a time traveler who is sent into the year 802,701. The traveler finds himself in a society of two races, the Eloi, peaceful dwellers who live above ground and the Morlocks, ape-like creatures who live below ground. It is a cautionary tale taking on the themes of evolution, capitalism, and social class division.

A Sound of Thunder, Ray Bradbury (1952)

science fiction, fantasy

Time travel, safari hunting and the opportunity to take down a Tyrannosaurus Rex. That’s what Time Safari offers its customers when it sends them sixty million years into the past. But there are strict rules and real dangers to anyone who breaks them. All travelers must stay on the designated Path provided by Time Safari. Anyone stepping off of it could create a ripple in time that could alter the future, the concept known as the “butterfly effect”. Bradbury asks us to consider our actions and how they effect the world. (In The Stories of Ray Bradbury and A Sound of Thunder and other Stories .)

Book Audiobook

The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov (1955)

science fiction, romance

Considered his best by many, this short fiction novel places time travel outside of linear reality. The non-linear world, Eternity, is a location outside of time and place where an elite few, the Eternals, monitor and alter time’s cause and effect relationships. Andrew Harlan is an Eternal. On one of his assignments, he falls in love with a woman who lives in linear time only to find out she will not exist after the next change. He risks everything to bring her to Eternity with him, but his actions create a paradox that threatens the existence of Eternity. To fix the problem, he is given his next assignment. He must kill the woman he loves.

The Door into Summer, Robert A. Heinlein (1957)

This short fiction book is one of Heinlein’s lighter novels and uses time travel in a limited way. It begins in 1970. Dan Davis is the successful inventor of a household robot, an automated “cleaning lady” called Hired Girl . With the help of his fiancée, Belle and their friend Miles, his new company is thriving beyond his wildest dreams. But Belle and Miles betray him, steal his patents, and trick him into spending thirty years in suspended animation. They thought that was the end of Dan.

What they didn’t expect was that time travel exists in the year 2000. When Dan wakes up from thirty years of sleep, he is able to go back to 1970 where he recovers his research and then returns to the year 2000 with his reputation, invention and fiancée.

About the Author

IVY BRUNELLE is a Reference Librarian at PPL. She accidentally became a sci-fi geek in college. But if you asked her about it, she’d deny the whole thing, then silently slip through a portal of ancient standing stones.

• Solar Eclipse 2024

10 Surprising Facts About the 2024 Solar Eclipse

A total solar eclipse will sweep across North America on Monday, April 8, offering a spectacle for tens of millions of people who live in its path and others who will travel to see it.

A solar eclipse occurs during the new moon phase, when the moon passes between Earth and the sun, casting a shadow on Earth and totally or partially blocking our view of the sun. While an average of two solar eclipses happen every year, a particular spot on Earth is only in the path of totality every 375 years on average, Astronomy reported .

“Eclipses themselves aren't rare, it's just eclipses at your house are pretty rare,” John Gianforte, director of the University of New Hampshire Observatory, tells TIME. If you stay in your hometown, you may never spot one, but if you’re willing to travel, you can witness multiple. Gianforte has seen five eclipses and intends to travel to Texas this year, where the weather prospects are better.

One fun part of experiencing an eclipse can be watching the people around you. “They may yell, they scream, they cry, they hug each other, and that’s because it’s such an amazingly beautiful event,” Gianforte, who also serves as an extension associate professor of space science education, notes. “Everyone should see at least one in their life, because they’re just so spectacular. They are emotion-evoking natural events.”

Here are 10 surprising facts about the science behind the phenomenon, what makes 2024’s solar eclipse unique, and what to expect.

The total eclipse starts in the Pacific Ocean and ends in the Atlantic 

The darker, inner shadow the moon casts is called the umbra , in which you can see a rarer total eclipse. The outer, lighter second shadow is called the penumbra, under which you will see a partial eclipse visible in more locations.

The total eclipse starts at 12:39 p.m. Eastern Time, a bit more than 620 miles south of the Republic of Kiribati in the Pacific Ocean, according to Astronomy . The umbra remains in contact with Earth’s surface for three hours and 16 minutes until 3:55 p.m. when it ends in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 340 miles southwest of Ireland.

The umbra enters the U.S. at the Mexican border just south of Eagle Pass, Texas, and leaves just north of Houlton, Maine, with one hour and eight minutes between entry and exit, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) tells TIME in an email.

Mexico will see the longest totality during the eclipse 

The longest totality will extend for four minutes and 28 seconds on a 350-mile-long swath near the centerline of the eclipse, including west of Torreón, Mexico, according to NASA.

In the U.S., some areas of Texas will catch nearly equally long total eclipses. For example, in Fredericksburg, totality will last four minutes and 23 seconds—and that gets slightly longer if you travel west, the agency tells TIME. Most places along the centerline will see totality lasting between three and a half minutes and four minutes.

More people currently live in the path of totality compared to the last eclipse 

An estimated 31.6 million people live in the path of totality for 2024’s solar eclipse, compared to 12 million during the last solar eclipse that crossed the U.S. in 2017, per NASA .

The path of totality is much wider than in 2017, and this year’s eclipse is also passing over more cities and densely populated areas than last time. 

A part of the sun which is typically hidden will reveal itself

Solar eclipses allow for a glimpse of the sun’s corona —the outermost atmosphere of the star that is normally not visible to humans because of the sun’s brightness.

The corona consists of wispy, white streamers of plasma—charged gas—that radiate from the sun. The corona is much hotter than the sun's surface —about 1 million degrees Celsius (1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit) compared to 5,500 degrees Celsius (9,940 degrees Fahrenheit).

The sun will be near its more dramatic solar maximum 

During the 2024 eclipse, the sun will be near “solar maximum.” This is the most active phase of a roughly 11-year solar cycle, which might lead to more prominent and evident sun activity, Gianforte tells TIME.  

“We're in a very active state of the sun, which makes eclipses more exciting, and [means there is] more to look forward to during the total phase of the eclipse,” he explains. 

People should look for an extended, active corona with more spikes and maybe some curls in it, keeping an eye out for prominences , pink explosions of plasma that leap off the sun’s surface and are pulled back by the sun’s magnetic field, and streamers coming off the sun.

Streamers “are a beautiful, beautiful shade of pink, and silhouetted against the black, new moon that's passing across the disk of the sun, it makes them stand out very well. So it's really just a beautiful sight to look up at the totally eclipsed sun,” Gianforte says.

Two planets—and maybe a comet—could also be spotted

Venus will be visible 15 degrees west-southwest of the sun 10 minutes before totality, according to Astronomy. Jupiter will also appear 30 degrees to the east-northeast of the sun during totality, or perhaps a few minutes before. Venus is expected to shine more than five times as bright as Jupiter. 

Another celestial object that may be visible is Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks , about six degrees to the right of Jupiter. Gianforte says the comet, with its distinctive circular cloud of gas and a long tail, has been “really putting on a great show in the sky” ahead of the eclipse.

The eclipse can cause a “360-degree sunset” 

A solar eclipse can cause a sunset-like glow in every direction—called a “360-degree sunset”—which you might notice during the 2024 eclipse, NASA said . The effect is caused by light from the sun in areas outside of the path of totality and only lasts as long as totality.

The temperature will drop 

When the sun is blocked out, the temperature drops noticeably. During the last total solar eclipse in the U.S. in 2017, the National Weather Service recorded that temperature dropped as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit. In Carbondale, Ill. for example, the temperature dropped from a peak of 90 degrees Fahrenheit just before totality to 84 degrees during totality.

Wildlife may act differently 

When the sky suddenly becomes black as though nighttime, confused “animals, dogs, cats, birds do act very differently ,” Gianforte says.

In the 2017 eclipse, scientists tracked that many flying creatures began returning to the ground or other perches up to 50 minutes before totality. Seeking shelter is a natural response to a storm or weather conditions that can prove deadly for small flying creatures, the report said. Then right before totality, a group of flying creatures changed their behavior again—suddenly taking flight before quickly settling back into their perches again.

There will be a long wait for the next total eclipse in the U.S.

The next total eclipse in the U.S. won’t happen until March 30, 2033, when totality will reportedly only cross parts of Alaska . The next eclipse in the 48 contiguous states is expected to occur on Aug. 12, 2044, with parts of Montana and North Dakota experiencing totality.

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