"You're Beyond the Stage for Omens, You're Now Headed in for the Kill, Yours or His"

IT was an American, Ray Bradbury, who kickstarted the idea of hunting dinosaurs before they turned into fossils, a sport that can, as his story demonstrates, have dire results. Brian Aldiss, an Englishman, turned to the same theme six years after Bradbury in a story that could be thought of as Claude Ford meets Francis Macomber, with the appropriate title of . . .

"Poor Little Warrior!"

By Brian W. Aldiss (1925-2017; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDB HERE; the SFE HERE; and the IMDb HERE).

First appearance: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1958.

Reprints page (ISFDB HERE).

Short short short story (6 pages).

Online at SFFaudio (HERE) and Baen Books (HERE).

   "OK, you keep saying to yourself insanely over and over, your million-dollar twenty-second-century education going for nothing, OK, OK."

TWO of the universal themes of literature that they try to teach you in college is MAN vs. NATURE—you know, humankind's struggle just to survive in what can be a hostile world—and MAN vs. MAN, usually resulting in hatred and war stemming from any or all of humanity's failings. At first glance, today's story seems to fit into the first category, but if you think about it, you might agree with us that it rests on yet another universal literary theme, MAN vs. HIMSELF . . .

Principal characters:

~ Claude Ford, Maude, and various flora and fauna.

Typo: "woiild sink".

References:

- "meets Francis Macomber" (HERE; WARNING! SPOILERS! Wikipedia).

- "to hunt a brontosaurus" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "the work of Mother Nature" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- ".65 self-loading, semi-automatic, dual-barrelled, digitally-computed, telescopically-sighted, rustless, high-powered rifle": That would make the bullet larger than the biggest standard machine gun round today (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "the ventricle" (HERE; Wikipedia) "keeps miraculous time with the auricle" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "Time for listening to the oracle is past" (HERE; Wikipedia.)

- "this bloody little urge to slay the dragon" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "the whole indifferent Jurassic world" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "a couple of hayricks-full" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "to unbecalm the Ancient Mariner" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "a saga, sagacious, Beowulfate" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "to wave the Woolworth Building" (HERE; Wikipedia) "at a tarsier" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "to shoot giant saurians" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "the dum-dums" (HERE; Wikipedia), "big as paw-paws" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "closed till Judgment Day" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "a creepy Secondary Era slowness" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "the sedimentary rocks" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "in a tomb finer than any Indian rajah ever boasted" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "in a brow of the Rockies" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "the contraterrene caverns" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "fumblingly fearful id" (HERE; Wikipedia).

- "all hope abandon, ye who entrail here": A parody of Dante's inscription over the gate to Hell (HERE; Wikipedia).

Resources:

- Ray Bradbury's story about dino hunting is "A Sound of Thunder" (Collier's, June 28, 1952; online at Lecturia HERE).

- Brutus Lloyd has an encounter with dinosaurs in Thorton Ayre's "The Case of the Mesozoic Monsters" (HERE; second story).

The bottom line:

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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