A Bit of Scouting
June 27, 2011 in Blogs
Today’s Examiner temporal anomalies article is entitled A Sound of Thunder part 9: scouting, and discusses a problem with the film that occurs when Dr. Ryer explains to Dr. Rand what would have happened to the allosaurus had they not shot it: how could he possibly know that? The article explains it.
Meanwhile, our poor dying car suffered another problem over the weekend, losing a ball joint in the rear end and so dropping the drive shaft while we were driving. It should be fixed tomorrow. It has made life more complicated again today.
It appears again that Eric Ashley is intent on posting more articles than I, but he does this in spurts and I’m not too worried that he’s going to catch up with my thousand Blogless Lepolt entries and couple hundred Game Ideas Unlimited articles, even with his impressive World-a-Week series. I am enjoying the new series despite its inherent discontinuity–snippets of stories that leave one wondering what would happen next. The new three are worth comment. Practise Bits: The Man On Horse is moody and brooding, following the path of a mercenary in a post-apocalyptic world. Practise Bits: Quest is something of a meandering opening that starts with a normal medieval world and then slips in bits of peculiarities to make it different. Practise Bits: Eating Alone puts a modern man in a magical setting and suggests work he might do and how the world might see him.
I’ve got new players on the forums, and much else on my plate, so I’d better get to it all.
–M. J. Young
JohnA1nut said on June 28, 2011
Have you read the story A Sound of Thunder? In that, they kill the animals a few seconds before they would have died anyway. They kill the Allosaurus right before a tree was to fall on top of it. The part I never got was that repeated gunfire would have scared away any animals in the vicinity. That in itself could seriously change history. What if their gunfire interrupted a mating ritual taking place five hundred yards away?
M. J. Young said on June 28, 2011
I did track down and read the story once I had seen the movie, and it’s got a lot of important differences. You’re right that they are less careful about changing the past in the story than they are in the movie, but they don’t try to kill the same animal twice. That aspect of killing it just before it dies is preserved in the movie, but Bradbury doesn’t handle the scout thing very well (the movie doesn’t handle it at all, though, so points to Bradbury for trying).
–M. J. Young
JohnA1nut said on June 29, 2011
The story A Sound of Thunder was the subject of the first email I ever sent you. At that time, you had never even heard of the story. At that time, I was just another time travel fan. You probably expected to never hear from me again. And look where we are now. Funny how that works.
JohnA1nut said on June 29, 2011
Two
Actually, the subject of the email was “Ray Bradbury” and the topic was that story. I believe I asked if you had ever read that story.
M. J. Young said on June 30, 2011
I probably answered that I had not, but that I had heard of it, because at least one person I know frequently mentioned the story about the guy who traveled to the past, stepped on a butterfly, and returned to a very different future. But he had a couple of stories he would mention.
Perhaps my favorite time travel story I’ve never read and can’t name involves some humans sending something back to the past to do some research, and one of the things that they wanted to determine was whether tampering with the past would have any impact on the present. They made several trips, and in the end the three-eyed bald multi-limbed scientists conducting the experiment determined that there were no such dangers, that the present would remain unchanged.
–M. J. Young
JohnA1nut said on June 30, 2011
Yeah, I didn’t expect that you would remember that email. At that time, I was just any other time travel fan.