Another Time Traveler

Very few fictional time travelers see the world changing around them while they are time traveling. Two who do are Wells's Time Traveler and Poul Anderson's Jack Havig. I have found another. In How Time Travelers Pass The Time, I discussed Beyond The Barrier (Feltham, Middlesex, 1978) by Damon Knight.

Knight's character, Naismith, starting from 1980, sees:

"...the sun arching overhead like a fireball..." (p. 56);

a rapid succession of light and darkness;

the landscape writhing and changing;

Denver extending new tentacles and sprouting taller buildings;

an abrupt gigantic crater followed by cessation of growth;

the dead city swallowed by the earth and replaced by "...a featureless plain." (p. 57)

Naismith's companions, from twenty thousand years later, think that the crater appears toward the end of the nineties but dismiss its precise date as unimportant!

Readers will recognize the arching sun and light-darkness alterations as comparable, indeed identical, to the Time Traveler's and Havig's experiences.