Short story masterclass: Future masters
FUTURE MASTERS
Learn from the SF classics with Helen M Walters
Putting together this article, I was overwhelmed by the number of brilliant SF stories out there. Even if you don’t consider yourself a science fiction fan, seek out some classic SF to read. I think you’ll be surprised.
My recommendations are A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, Nightfall by Isaac Asimov, and In The Abyss by HG Wells. But other names to look out for if you want to widen your reading experience are Arthur C Clarke, John Wyndham, Brian Aldiss and Philip K Dick. As always, you will get the most out of this masterclass if you read the stories, available online here: http://writ.rs/wmjune
Read all the feature stories online athttp://writ.rs/wmjune
Ray Bradbury
THUNDER
In A Sound Of Thunder, Ray Bradbury first takes us forward in time to 2055, just over a century after he wrote it. His futuristic 2055 is still recognisable despite being a hundred years in the future. The main character, Eckels, visits a fairly ordinary office, with a man sitting behind a desk. What lets us know that we are in the future is the presence of the time machine in the corner. If it weren’t for that, and the talk of shooting dinosaurs, this could be a present-day travel agency. Note that they are still using cheques.
Bradbury doesn’t go into huge detail about the way in which the time machine works; the fiction does not get bogged down by the science in this story. We are told just enough about what is going on to make the journey back in time seem plausible.
He then takes us back in time to a prehistoric world where dinosaurs still roam. He is creating an unfamiliar world, but not a completely unknown world. We’ve all seen pictures of dinosaurs and read about their habitat, so we can conjure up some idea of what they must be like.