If you ever wished you could have seen a real dinosaur, you have something in common with the characters in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder.” In this short story, time travel is real. The exposition of the tale includes the setting, characters, basic conflict and back-story needed to carry the reader toward the shocking conclusion.
On Their Way
The year is 2055, and time travel has become commercialized. Time Safari, Inc. sends customers into the past to hunt long-gone prey. Travis, the professional time-traveling safari guide, is in charge of a hunting party consisting of Eckels, Billings and Kramer. Also in the group is Lesperance, Travis’ assistant. A time machine takes them more than 60 million years into the past. Emerging from the machine, the group enters a lush, green wilderness. Each hunter wants to bag a dinosaur. Lesperance has tracked and marked creatures that are about to die naturally, and they are the targets. The challenge is to kill without disturbing any other element of the past. However, if the hunters cannot meet that requirement, they will alter the historical timeline of the world somehow. The question is, how much?
Related Articles
References
Writer Bio
Living in upstate New York, Susan Sherwood is a researcher who has been writing within educational settings for more than 10 years. She has co-authored papers for Horizons Research, Inc. and the Capital Region Science Education Partnership. Sherwood has a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction from the University at Albany.