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Ever since election day, 2016, I've joked about how I (and everyone reading this now) were bumped into an alternative universe, one where Trump became president instead of Clinton. Here's how it happened:
A group of us were vacationing in San Luis Potosi, Mexico on election day, 2016. I got permission from the management of the hotel we were staying in to connect my laptop to the large-screen television in their breakfast room so that we could livestream US channels and watch the election results come in.
We settled in with some drinks and were chatting happily as we watched the first returns get posted. As you remember, the polsters and pundits were quite sure that Hillary Clinton would win, and those early returns seemed to point the same way.
Then, without warning, a huge storm blew up. Rain was pouring down, a blast of wind smashed open an outside door and sheets of water blew in, flooding the floor. The downpour continued along with blasts of thunder and lightning, and within a few minutes the electricity and the wifi feed went off.
The hotel staff lit some candles to give us light, and we hunkered down for the next hour or so until the storm gradually abated and the power and the internet came back on.
You guessed it. By the time we could tune into the election results again, the votes from the midwest were coming in and Trump was winning. The storm, it seemed, had blown us into a different universe.
Now I realize that my feeling of having been transported into an alternate world may have been seeded by a science fiction story that I read nearly 60 years ago.
With the help of the internet, it didn't take long to find the story, called "A Sound of Thunder," wirtten by Ray Bradbury and first published in Collier's Magazine on June 28, 1952. I read it a few years later in a collection of Bradbury's short stories, The Golden Apples of the Sun, published in 1953.
The story is set sometime after the year 2055, one day after a US presidential election in which Keith, a man who " . . . will make a fine President of the United States," defeated the dangerous Deutscher,
"If Deutscher had gotten in," Bradbury writes, "we'd have the worst kind of dictatorship. There's an anti everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, antihuman, anti-intellectual."
We learn that time travel is now possible, and that Eckels, the story's protagonsit, has contracted with a company that will take him on a hunting excursion back to the age of the dinosaurs with the aim of bagging a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It's explained that the company has targeted a particular T. Rex that would have died by natural causes seconds later, so as not to change anything in the past. His hunting guides also emphasize that Eckels absolutely must stay on a floating metal pathway, again to avoid making an inadvertent change to the past that could reverberate in unpredictable ways back to the future.
Unfortunately, when confronted by the actual tyrannosaur, Eckels panics and stumbles off the metal path back to the safety of the time machine.
When they get back to the present, things are subtly, subliminally different. In particular, a sign that had been written in good English before the trip back in time is now written in a crude pidgin. Eckels scrapes the mud off his boots and finds a single crushed butterfly. Bradbury writes:
"It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels' mind whirled. It couldn't change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?"
Eckels fearfully asks who won yesterday's election. The company representative laughs and says, "You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!"
For me, it took a huge thunderstorm. For Bradbury, all that was needed was a butterfly.*
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*For a discussion of how Bradbury's story may have contributed to the famous "butterfly effect," from chaos theory, check out this Wikipedia entry.
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Robert Adler
Credit: ABE Books
A group of us were vacationing in San Luis Potosi, Mexico on election day, 2016. I got permission from the management of the hotel we were staying in to connect my laptop to the large-screen television in their breakfast room so that we could livestream US channels and watch the election results come in.
We settled in with some drinks and were chatting happily as we watched the first returns get posted. As you remember, the polsters and pundits were quite sure that Hillary Clinton would win, and those early returns seemed to point the same way.
Then, without warning, a huge storm blew up. Rain was pouring down, a blast of wind smashed open an outside door and sheets of water blew in, flooding the floor. The downpour continued along with blasts of thunder and lightning, and within a few minutes the electricity and the wifi feed went off.
The hotel staff lit some candles to give us light, and we hunkered down for the next hour or so until the storm gradually abated and the power and the internet came back on.
You guessed it. By the time we could tune into the election results again, the votes from the midwest were coming in and Trump was winning. The storm, it seemed, had blown us into a different universe.
Now I realize that my feeling of having been transported into an alternate world may have been seeded by a science fiction story that I read nearly 60 years ago.
With the help of the internet, it didn't take long to find the story, called "A Sound of Thunder," wirtten by Ray Bradbury and first published in Collier's Magazine on June 28, 1952. I read it a few years later in a collection of Bradbury's short stories, The Golden Apples of the Sun, published in 1953.
The story is set sometime after the year 2055, one day after a US presidential election in which Keith, a man who " . . . will make a fine President of the United States," defeated the dangerous Deutscher,
"If Deutscher had gotten in," Bradbury writes, "we'd have the worst kind of dictatorship. There's an anti everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, antihuman, anti-intellectual."
We learn that time travel is now possible, and that Eckels, the story's protagonsit, has contracted with a company that will take him on a hunting excursion back to the age of the dinosaurs with the aim of bagging a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It's explained that the company has targeted a particular T. Rex that would have died by natural causes seconds later, so as not to change anything in the past. His hunting guides also emphasize that Eckels absolutely must stay on a floating metal pathway, again to avoid making an inadvertent change to the past that could reverberate in unpredictable ways back to the future.
Unfortunately, when confronted by the actual tyrannosaur, Eckels panics and stumbles off the metal path back to the safety of the time machine.
When they get back to the present, things are subtly, subliminally different. In particular, a sign that had been written in good English before the trip back in time is now written in a crude pidgin. Eckels scrapes the mud off his boots and finds a single crushed butterfly. Bradbury writes:
"It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels' mind whirled. It couldn't change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?"
Eckels fearfully asks who won yesterday's election. The company representative laughs and says, "You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!"
For me, it took a huge thunderstorm. For Bradbury, all that was needed was a butterfly.*
-----
*For a discussion of how Bradbury's story may have contributed to the famous "butterfly effect," from chaos theory, check out this Wikipedia entry.
-----
Robert Adler
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