“A Sound of Thunder” read by Ray Bradbury (mp3) Ray Bradbury had a wonderful speaking voice, his accent a friendly combination of Midwest and Angelino.īecause I love you, dearest blog readers, here is “A Sound of Thunder” read by Ray Bradbury, so you can hear for yourself: They don’t belong in the Past they might change anything. The bullets! The bullets can’t be left behind. Look at this: “The Monster’s dead, you idiot. Artist William Stout was commissioned to illustrate the story for a Bradbury anthology called Dinosaur Tales. Not only do I consider it the best time travel narrative of all time (sorry about that), it’s a damned perfect short story. Hearing about it is one thing, reading it is another. When I saw The Time Machine on TV, Pop told me about “A Sound of Thunder.” In fact, the two of us were shocked to realize that for several years in the 1930s, my father had read every science fiction novel ever written! So, I spent many hours as a child looking at the covers of sci-fi paperbacks, imagining what the books were actually about. Pop was older than most of my friends’ parents (like Will and Charles Halloway in Something Wicked This Way Comes) and had been reading science fiction since he was a kid.

My father had actually told me about “A Sound of Thunder” but I had never read it. And the seventh was the greatest time travel narrative ever written. The third was the inspiration for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. The first story was about boys who dreamed of going into space. And I immediately wondered why any teacher would make kids read A Wrinkle in Time when this existed. She went back to her desk and came back and put a copy of R is for Rocket on my desk.

I had already read it in another class (actually half of it, because I got bored), so I asked the teacher if I could read something else instead. In 7th grade English class, we were assigned A Wrinkle in Time.

R is for Rocket by Ray Bradbury