Extinctions: Close Reading
The past is not some detached reality, but an event which has a continued influence over the happenings of the present and future. Past, present, and future aren’t separate, but intrinsically linked so that they can’t help but influence each other. It is, therefore, necessary to consider not only the interactions between organisms and their environment (or between humans and non-humans), but additionally, how these interactions are influenced by, and mediated through, time (as a fourth dimension). It is the fundamental nature of these connections, that Bradbury pursues in A Sound of Thunder.
To understand this text, it is necessary to recognise the complexities of the ideas he explores; namely, extinctions.
Extinctions present an ecological anomaly. They are simultaneously a biological inevitability - the outcome of a species’ inability to adapt to a changing environment or overcome a particular threat - as well as an impossibility, when recognising that through time (which is just as important as any other dimension in framing how we can perceive and understand the world) all creatures persist and are represented in the genes of surviving organisms. Even as one species dies, they remain inexplicably linked to other forms of life. And just as all organisms remain connected through time, so do the ‘boundaries’ between life and death, between extinction and preservation, become blurred as the necessary relationship between the two are made more evident.
All organisms interact not only with their physical environment, but with the past and with the future of these environments. Any modern bird (archosaur), for example, carries in its DNA the vestiges of the dinosaurs, which will be transferred on to future generations. We determine that dinosaurs are extinct, firstly because we observe their absence in our world (birds do not fit with the typical assumptions of what constitutes a dinosaur and are thus ignored), and secondly because we cannot comprehend time beyond our individual temporal limitations, making us blind to those natural intra-actions which enable all forms of life to remain connected.
This leads to the conclusion that the word ‘extinctions’, like many terms employed by humanity, serves more to condense and simplify the processes that govern natural world, than it does to enhance our understanding of them. Additionally, what is perceived and defined as ‘life’ relies upon the assumption that, at some indeterminate point, there will be a permanent cessation of being. Life cannot occur without death. In this way, life and death intra-act to form the basic narrative of our existence, which in turn dictates how we exist and engage with the world.
Humans typically view time as linear, and the past, present, and future as separate entities. However, as A Sound of Thunder indicates, there is some instinctive understanding that time is more complex and more malleable than that. This has been demonstrated in just about every story that deals with time travel in some way. The primary concern in a great many time travel stories is doing something in the past that impacts the character’s present, or the future. However, this isn’t a one-way street. While the focus of time travel stories tend to be on how changing the past will affect the future, what is always included in this by default is that the future is also interacting with the past. Bradbury’s story centres around how the past changes the future, but the narrative is created by the future changing the past, and the complexity of the present (which can be different for reader and character) is tied into the whole mess. Time works beyond the linear understanding we have of it.
This means that our understanding of death, and by extension extinction, is flawed. If time isn’t linear, if the past, present, and future don’t follow each other neatly, then how can we say any animal is gone forever?
The human assumption that time progresses linearly and can’t be changed beyond that is overly simplified, and also amusing considering even a brief examination of stories featuring time travel give it the lie. Time travel stories can be told in a number of ways, with a number of different theories of how time operates, but they all show a non-linear interaction between past, present, and future. For instance, some stories will have a character go back in time to change the past, only to discover that that’s the reason the future happened (Night Watch by Terry Pratchett is an example of this). In this case, the past only happened because of the future, and vice-versa. Past and future are too closely linked to be separated. A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury is a different example -- it shows the future acting on the past, and thus changing the progression of time. The future and the past still act on and interact with each other, just in a different way.