I think it's because I was never as into sci-fi as many of my friends were that I never got as into Ray Bradbury as those same friends. In my years of a more intense kind of dystopia-fanboyism, I always felt compelled to shrug at anyone who put Fahrenheit 451 in the same league with 1984 and Brave New World. It was good, but somehow lacked the thorough societal examination that I thought the others had done so well; or just one man's cranky, if accurate, rant against television--part of a tech-suspicious philosophy he held on to to the last. As that part of my life faded--and as I started to recognize that Asimov was probably the most accurate predictor of the future (Huxley took silver in that race, Orwell the bronze)--I still thought of Bradbury's opus as an also-ran.
But one of his short stories has managed to stick with me for several years. Because it's a short story and because it's relatively easy to find and because you were probably forced to read it in high school, too, I won't recount the details of A Sound of Thunder, which doesn't have the weight of Fahrenheit, but remains lodged in my brain much more tightly. Not for the dinosaur-hunting (though that alone might have done it), but for his simplifying of the concept of time travel and alternate timelines, a topic that many writers often seem to want to make as complicated and unapproachable as possible. That simple, almost reductive, embrace of the complex that usually turned me off to his work (while endearing millions of people more reasonable than I), actually served to draw me in and direct me to the heart of the idea: the interconnectedness of all things and the humor, tragedy, romance and horror that are part and parcel with that connection. And though the ending of A Sound of Thunder was probably more of a funny idea to him than a warning to us, it contained an important tie-in with his philosophy about life being "too serious to take seriously:" it's probably not worth the analysis we're inevitably going to give it.
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