If you had a time machine, what would you do with it? Would you go back in time to fix your mistakes, or will you go into the future to see how you end up? Of course, there’s another option, in which you charge people to use your time machine, thus making lots of money. The last option is the one explored by Ray Bradbury in his short story, A Sound of Thunder. A theme in this story is how people just refuse to believe the wide range of consequences that their actions can have.
In the story, Mr. Eckels, a hunter, goes back in time to hunt a T-Rex. His guides warn him of the massive consequences of interacting with anything there, which he takes lightly. They go on to say how they’re allowed to kill the T-Rex because that dinosaur will die in two minutes from a falling tree. When they meet the dinosaur, Mr. Eckels fled in fear, off the “Path,” a floating path meant to make sure they don’t touch anything in the past, finding his way back to the time machine after the other hunters kill the beast. His guides are worried that he touched the grass, and become furious when they realize he killed a butterfly by stepping on it. One of the guides threaten to shoot him if anything goes wrong with the future, and when they travel back, they find their language changed and that the newly elected president from their timeline lost here. The story ends with Eckels falling to his knees in disbelief, and the guide shooting him.
In this story, Mr. Eckels and to some extent the guides both think that they can get away with their actions without facing the consequences. Mr. Eckles didn’t think that touching the grass and killing a butterfly could change the future, and the guides didn’t think killing the T-Rex two minutes before it was scheduled to die would affect the future. However, some combination of these two things caused the future to be changed in drastic ways. Either or both of these could be responsible, even though the guides firmly decided that the blame was to fall on Mr. Eckels. In the end, even Mr. Eckels knew his actions’ consequences, but the guides remained in disbelief.
The story A Sound of Thunder is a slightly exaggerated method to show the reader how actions have consequences, through the science fiction trope of time travel. Mr. Eckels and the guides didn’t realize this, and ended up rewriting history. In addition, a side theme is how people can criticize others for a mistake while being blind to their own. The guides execute Mr. Eckels for messing up the future, while completely ignoring the fact that they too changed the past.