This past week I read A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, a justly famous story, as all of Bradbury’s works would be were they all so famous. It has, of course, his gorgeously lyrical prose linked with his vibrant imagination (“The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire world forever and forever”), touching on fascinating science-fiction ideas.

The story, for those who don’t know, concerns a company called Time Safaris that takes big game hunters into the past to hunt extinct animals. Since they aren’t sure of the consequences of changing the past, they have a strict rule to remain only on the hovering path provided and only shoot animals that have been marked as about to die anyway. The story depicts one such trip where a foolish customer panics at the sight of a T-Rex and disobeys orders, steps on a butterfly sixty-odd million years in the past (“Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead”), resulting in them coming back to find a changed world.

Though honestly, they got off easily. English words are spelled differently, people and decor are different, and a single election turned out otherwise (if we’re being honest, if Fascist McDictator was a viable candidate at all, then the nation has bigger problems than whether he wins or loses). They could have come back to find no America at all, or no humans at all, but rather a civilization of giant clams. Still, the point is interesting to think about; the question of how far even a small change in the distant past might affect the present.

That being said, there’s an aspect of the story that struck me as more forceful than the Butterfly Effect. After all, Time Travel isn’t possible, and likely never will be. The question of what would happen if you go back in time and step on a butterfly is fun, but not really applicable (save in making you more thoughtful in your future actions).

But what is interesting, and applicable, is the central premise that the company is able to do this at all. You have Time Travel technology. You’ve run the math and know how insanely dangerous it could be, how drastically, irreversibly you might alter reality. And…you use it to take members of the public on tourist trips to shoot animals.

The funny thing, to me, is that the company explains how much graft they had to pay for the government to let them stay in business, and how violating the rules comes with a huge fine.

That is to say, they run a business that could easily destroy the world as we know it with one bad trip, but they’re allowed to do so because they paid enough for it that the government couldn’t say no.

“Yes, it’s unfathomably dangerous and could have apocalyptic repercussions, putting literally everyone on Earth at risk with each trip, but on the other hand, that is a lot of money….”

I have to imagine that this was intentional on Mr. Bradbury’s part as a satire of how the American system works.

It also struck me as unexpectedly timely: the whole set up made me think of the Titanic submersible from earlier this year. Again, something extraordinarily dangerous and ethically questionable run as a profit-making enterprise that ends in disaster.

Anyway, hunt it up and give it a read if you haven’t already: it’s one of the classic American science fiction shorts.