BtVS S8.38 "Last Gleaming" Part 3

There’s a James Tiptee story (there’s always a James Tiptree story) called The Man Who Walked Home. It starts in a post-apocalyptic world with a preternaturally barren crater and slowly, as centuries pass and a new civilisation grows up around it, the mystery of the annual disturbances at its centre becomes clearer. Added together like the pages of one of those flicker books the annual happenings reveal the image of a man stumbling and grasping for something. This man was the first and last chrononaut who, sent too far forward, somehow, impossibly found a way back and in doing so triggered the explosion that ended his world. The strength of the story lies in Tiptree’s evocation of the time traveller’s thoughts in his final fatal moments. Exiled beyond reason, consumed by longing for the home he had lost, reaching for it with every cell of his failing body.

( Generals, snakes and seahorses  )