Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is our discussion of the story:


The Man Who Walked Home by James Tiptree Jr.

This story can be read online @Baen.

This story is part of the group discussion of James Tiptree Jr.'s short story collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. (See the discussion hub topic for more info.)

Maybe this story should have had a resurgence about the time they began running the Large Hadron Collider. In this case, an accident at a particle accelerator, who scientists thought they could send something forward a few moments in time, wipes out most of the planet's life. Years later, in the crater of that ground zero, shepherds notice a brief annual apparition.

Centuries later, scientists have decided this annual apparition is John Delgano, the intended chrononaut, and they surmise he is moving backwards in time, where his arrival in the world's past but his future will trigger the disaster. He's only moving a second or so throw time each year. Some characters make much in their discussion of his future/our past opposite timelines, but the events of the story really don't seem affected by it.

The century-standing main story is bracketed by prepare brief 1st-person, extremely jumbled and confused impressions, presumably belonging to John. Apparently he's consciously trying to get home.

Despite some interesting thoughts on timelines, I'm not sure I entirely got the point of this story.

**

★★★★★

Major John Delgano is the Man Who Walked Home from a time far in the future back to his original time and place. Traveling in time seems to be the easy part - the hard part being the synchronization with changes in space, feeling like a stone skipping on water and gaining ever more momentum. At the time he was sent out, there happened to be an apocalyptic explosion leading to a world-wide atomar war, and throwing humanity back to bronze age. The stories follows the development of civilization in great leaps at the spot of the explosion in Idaho. Every year, a shape appears for only a second, the sight developing over the course of several hundred years into a tourist magnet and the object of religious beliefs and science.

Review

The interleaving of forward and backward time travel is an excellent sample of structural narrative techniques of SF. Tiptree manages it to start with expressive elements and only slowly uncovers the story's essence. The initial panic in a stream of consciousness gives way to ever more reasoning just to turn into a very emotional scene: Science found out that the appearance is speaking, they even identified one single sillable, something like "ayt", maybe "late" or "date". But in the final scene, John desperately calls out for his wife "Kate". This moment stayed quite long with me, and it even gained with a re-read.

Isn't it strange how our opinions diverge? It might be the narrative style that you find "jumbled and confused" but I really loved: It is not only working perfectly as a framing story, but a central constructive element, as it is mirroring his backward journey with emotional strength that could only be told by a stream-of-consciousness (and fading out with a simple "Kate").

Andreas wrote: "It might be the narrative style that you find "jumbled and confused" but I really loved..."

I guess I'm not really much for random stream of consciousness. Neither the opening or closing bracketing text made much sense to me until the last sentence or two of each.

The rest of the story just worked okay for me. There is a slow reveal as to what the occasional manifestation in the crater is. I'm not really clear on why its first described as a "a huge flat animal making dreadful roar", without any reference to its basically human nature (even wearing some sort of protective environmental suit, whatever.)

The story did have some cute elements. "The sheep had run away. Since this last was visibly true, some elders investigated. Finding no sign of the monster and no place in which it could hide, they settled for beating the children."

Also not really clear how the later scientists, centuries after the event, seemed to suddenly learn so much about John Delgano; it's not like the original left any survivors. (I know, that investigation isn't really the point of the story.)

So he's going one way and time and everyone else is going the other, and so what? It just didn't seem very interesting to me.

I liked this story (I probably fall between your two ratings). I felt the poignancy of the "lost in time" arc & the inclusion of a particle collider was one factor that made the story feel relevant.

It made sense to me that the "Tall Man" who visited was Delgado's brother & that he passed on the scientific explanation for the apparition. On the one hand, 500 years is a pretty long time for such a thoroughly preserved record to survive, but we have plenty of documentary evidence that old & presumably some of the Northwest survivors had archival training. I wasn't as clear on why Delgado's return caused the initial explosion -- would it have been different if he had arrived on two feet instead of being knocked over? That seemed implied but unlikely. (Or do I have that wrong & the explosion happened before he was thrust forward into time? I thought that was the case at first, but the ending implied that, while Delgado's test mission might have failed either way, it wouldn't have been catastrophic without the return.)

It was interesting to finally get some named characters once local society reached the pseudo-pioneer/Victorian era, but I didn't really care that much about the three we met. (Does naming only the more "modern" characters result from a troubling ? While I enjoyed some of the passing-of-time narrative -- like the sheep & children detail -- is it significant that the less technologically advanced survivors are not named and described primarily as "brown" and "black." Do we know anything about the apparent race of the later scientists or cultists?) In terms of plot satisfaction, it would have been nice to have a little more definition of the stakes in terms of Delgado's fall & whether preventing it would have made any difference.