This piece has a number of inspirations, not the least of which are the doom prophecies that we all hear about time and time again. Let’s face it: there’s few things we like better than predicting the end of the world.



A literary inspiration in both the title and the theme of this piece comes from H. G. Wells’ novel: The Time Machine, where, towards the end, the protagonist goes well over thirty million years into the future, and experiences a world that has stopped turning, and perpetually faces a sun that has become a red giant.



He sees everything through dark red tints as he finds himself on the shore of an unknown sea, where there are no longer tides and waves, and the only living things he can see are football-sized and slowly moving crustaceans.



Even more than thirty years after I first read them, I find these images still as vivid as they were on that day in 1983, when I finished the book.