Tony Travis

A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury starts with an offer that is hard to resist: travel into the past and hunt a dinosaur. Eckels pays for the trip, but there is one rule he cannot break. He must stay on the path. Even a small change to the past could alter the future. What would latter be known as the butterfly effect. Some of the dinosaur science shows its age, and Bradbury’s descriptions get a little thick when the animal arrives. The tension still works for me. He takes the idea that one...

The Lurking Fear opens with a slaughtered mountain village, a deserted mansion, and the belief that something comes out when the thunder rolls. Lovecraft makes the woods, the storms, and even the small mounds in the ground feel threatening. Typical of him he goes after the toll fear takes on the mind as part of the horror. I like how the mystery changes as the narrator investigates. It feels as events are being uncovered. At first, the fear could be a ghost, an animal, or something much...

The Last Question begins with a five-dollar bet and a question about whether humanity can ever reverse entropy. Asimov follows that question across civilizations, galaxies, and eventually the universe. Humanity keeps finding ways to survive, but the same problem waits at the end of every solution. Some of the science is dated, but Asimov wrote this in the 1950s, and the story is still compelling. We master the stars, extend our lives, and build computers beyond our understanding, but what...