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Past, present, paradox: writing about time travel, crafting a believable time travel story requires careful consideration of the logic at play. let's crack the temporal code on traveling through time in fiction.

Graphic depicting time in three-dimensional space.

Time travel in fiction can open your story to infinite possibilities. Ever wondered what it would be like if somebody taught the Romans how to make a nuclear bomb? Do you need to retcon an event in your story? Time travel!

It may seem simple for your time-traveling characters to hop in Tony’s Terrific Temporal Transport and whiz through time, but there are many hurdles to overcome when writing about time travel.

Chief among these is dealing with time travel paradoxes, so let’s look at those, discuss how you can write convincing time travel stories, and explore how some popular stories handle it.

The Problem With Time Travel

Consider an ordinary day in your life. It follows a sequence of events where one thing leads to another. This is called causality , the concept that everything that happens results from events that happened before it. The problem with time travel in fiction, especially travel to the past, is that it often breaks the rules of causality.

$Triumphant swan with fractal rippling effect.$

This can lead to time travel paradoxes and unforeseen results , including:

Continuity paradoxes: The act of time travel renders itself impossible.
Closed causal loop paradoxes: Traveling to the past creates a condition where an idea, object, or person has no identifiable origin and exists in a closed loop in time that repeats infinitely.
The butterfly effect: Even the smallest action can have massive consequences.

With all that in mind, let’s embark on a journey through time and explore these further!

Grandfather Paradox

This thought experiment posits the idea of somebody traveling back in time and killing their grandfather before their parents were born. Because the grandfather never has children, the time traveler—his grandchild—cannot exist.

However, if the time traveler never existed, they couldn’t kill their grandfather, so he would go on to have children and grandchildren. One of those grandchildren is the time traveler, though, who might go back in time and kill their grandfather. If that seems confusing, it’s okay—it’s supposed to be.

The bottom line is that if somebody travels to the past and changes something that prevents them from ever traveling to the past, they have broken the timeline's continuity.

Polchinski’s Paradox

American theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski removed human intervention from the time travel equation.

Imagine a billiard ball travels into a wormhole, tunnels through time in a closed loop, and emerges from the same wormhole just in time to knock its past self away.

Doing so prevents it from ever entering the wormhole and traveling through time, to begin with. However, if it does not travel back in time, it cannot emerge to knock itself out of the way, giving it a clear path to travel back in time.

Bootstrap Paradox

The Bootstrap Paradox is the first closed causal loop paradox we will explore. This presents a situation where an object, idea, or person traveling to the past creates the conditions for their existence, leading to it having no identifiable origin in the timeline.

Imagine sending the schematics for your time machine to your past self, from which you create a time machine. Where did the knowledge of how to create the time machine begin?

Predestination Paradox

The most nihilistic of paradoxes explores the idea that nothing we do matters, no matter what. Events are predetermined to still occur regardless of when and where you travel in time.

Suppose you time travel to the past to talk Alexander the Great out of invading Persia, but he hadn’t even considered this until you mentioned it. By traveling to the past to prevent Alexander’s conquest, you caused it.

Butterfly Effec t

Less of a paradox and more an exploration of unintended consequences, the butterfly effect explores the idea that any action can have sweeping repercussions, no matter how small.

In the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lorenz discovered that adding tiny changes to computer-based meteorological models resulted in unpredictable changes far from the origin point. In traveling back in time, we don’t know what effect even minor changes might have on the timeline.

How to Write Convincing Time Travel Stories

Time travel can be pretty complex at the best of times, but that doesn't mean writing about it has to be a challenge. Here are a few practical tips to craft narratives that crack the temporal code.

Miniature woman looks amazed at life-sized pocket watch.

Ask Yourself, "Why Time Travel?"

If your story has time travel, to begin with, it likely plays a pretty significant role in the narrative. Define the purpose that time travel has in your story by asking yourself questions like:

How and why is time travel possible in your setting?
What does it mean for your story and your characters?
What are your characters meant to use time travel for?
Is the actual practice of time travel different from its intent?

If you can't be clear about time travel's purpose in your story, how can you convincingly write about it? To get crafty with time, you first need to master its relevant mechanics.

Keep a Record of Everything

You're asking your reader to potentially make several mental leaps when time travel is involved in a story, so it's imperative to have all of your details sorted. Do the work of planning out dates and events ahead of time by creating a time map for yourself—like a mindmap, but for a timeline.

You'll be able to keep a birds-eye view of the narrative at all times, be more strategic about moving the order of events around, and ensure that you never miss a detail. You may even want to have multiple versions—a strictly linear timeline and a more loosely structured time map where you draw connections between events and in the order they appear in the narrative.

In Campfire, you can do both with the Timeline Module —create as many Timelines as you want by using the Page feature in the element. You can also connect your Timeline(s) to a custom calendar from the Calendar Module for extra fun with time wonkiness in your world.

If a new idea pops up while writing, don't stress! You'll have your handy time map already laid out so you can easily see if a new scene or chapter makes sense, as well as where it will best fit into the narrative.

Never Forget Causality

I mentioned this concept earlier in the article, but it should be reiterated: The most important rule of time travel is that every action results in a consequence. Remember cause and effect : an action is taken (your character time travels to the past), and causes an effect, the consequence (the timeline is forever changed).

"Consequence" doesn't have to be a negative thing, either, even though the word has that connotation. The resulting consequence of a given action could be a positive effect, too.

Regardless, seek to maintain causality so you don't confuse your readers (or yourself, for that matter). Establishing clear rules for how time travel works in your setting and sticking to them will help you keep your time logic consistent and avoid running into narrative dead ends or plot holes.

Tips & Tricks For the Time-Traveling Author

Now that we’ve examined several obstacles you can encounter when writing about time travel, let’s see how you can either avoid them or exploit them. That’s right! Even time travel paradoxes present opportunities for superb storytelling.

Man in surreal scene with wooden sign post pointing in three directions: past, present, and future.

Focus on the Future

Fortunately, all the named paradoxes here involve the past, so the easy way to avoid them is to not go there! Thanks to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, you don’t even have to invent a clever way to travel instead to the future.

An aspect of Einstein's theory is time dilation , in which the faster an object moves through space, the slower it moves through time. With this, you need only zip around at near the speed of light for a few weeks or months, and when you come back to Earth, years or centuries will have gone by.

Create a Multiverse

A popular trope in science fiction today, and a theory gaining popularity among theoretical quantum physicists, is the multiverse concept. According to multiverse theory, whenever an event occurs, every possible outcome of the event happens simultaneously, splitting the universe into parallels that each contain differing outcomes.

Since all these realities exist, perhaps changing the past is simply a way for time travelers to travel between realities, shifting their perspective to a timeline where things occurred differently than in their original reality.

Get Creative With Consequences

Instead of avoiding paradoxes, maybe you want them to occur. Leading to some fascinating stories, this can be approached in a variety of ways. Perhaps you want to examine the unintended consequences of the butterfly effect, create a time-traveling police force that enforces the laws of time travel, or simply break time itself and revel in the chaos that ensues.

Just be sure to remember the action-consequence rule and keep your timeline handy for easy reference—especially if you're toying around with multiple timelines!

Best Time Travel Stories

What follows are what I think are some of the best time travel stories. As you will see, the first two fall victim to time travel paradoxes, while the other two do a great job of exploring various elements we’ve discussed.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

The corporation Cyberdyne Systems has remnants of the Terminator from the first movie, which they use to create an artificial intelligence system called Skynet. Skynet then actually creates the terminators and sends one back in time. Thus, it gives humanity the technology to create itself in a classic example of a bootstrap paradox.

Back to the Future

In this film, Marty McFly travels to the past and inadvertently interrupts the event where his parents first meet. This causes a chain of events where Marty’s parents never get married and have children, threatening to erase Marty and his siblings from the timeline.

Some argue that the McFly offspring ceasing to exist is a great exploration of the consequences of time travel. However, they would never have been at risk had Marty not been in the past to impede their parents’ romance. And if he ceases to exist, he’ll never go back and get in the way, thus creating a grandfather paradox.

War of the Twins

In this second volume of the Dragonlance Legends trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the mage Raistlin Majere travels into the past, kills a wizard named Fistandantilus in a battle for power, and assumes his identity. Throughout the book, Raistlin unwittingly follows the historical fate of Fistandantilus, in a wonderful exploration of the predestination paradox.

It’s hard to talk about time travel in fiction these days without mentioning Loki. The show explores two suggestions from my list above: the multiverse and policing the timeline. In this series, varying outcomes of events lead to branching timelines, creating a multiverse of possibilities. However, an agency called the Time Variance Authority exists to prevent this from happening, and they set out to eliminate any branches separate from what they consider the Sacred Timeline.

Bon Voyage!

I hope this exploration of time travel leaves you prepared to tackle these obstacles and opportunities that naturally present themselves when playing around with time.

Just knowing about the complexities of time travel and the paradoxes it can bring about is the best way to avoid trouble and create innovative storytelling moments. So, dust off your DeLorean, polish your paradox-proof plot, and get ready to write your adventure through the ages!

Learn more about making a timeline with Campfire in the dedicated Timeline Module tutorial . And be sure to check out the other plotting and planning articles and videos here on Learn, for advice on how to plan your very own time travel adventures!

Write For Us

The Rules of Time Travel for Fiction Writers

Time travel is a staple of great fiction—when it’s done right. When it’s done wrong, you’re turning wormholes into plot holes instead. Here’s how to get a handle on the mechanics of time travel for fiction.

Doing Fictional Research

Start off by researching tales of fictional time travel and go through all the short stories, books, and movies you can get your hands on. Feel free to take your own notes on the story while you do this. If there’s a time paradox, ask yourself which—and why . Excellent examples from film are 12 Monkeys , The Butterfly Effect , Project Almanac and Back to the Future . (There are plenty more, including Hot Tub Time Machine .) Good books include The Time Traveller’s Wife , The Time Machine and 22/11/63 .

Family Guy’s Back to the Multiverse does a good job at explaining what’s called the multiverse theory, where people aren’t just traveling through time, but skipping through alternate realities as they do so—here, the “rules” of the universe can be a little different, like the point where Family Guy’s Brian and Stewie find themselves going through a Disney-like alternate reality where there’s, well, a lot of singing.

Sounding “Sciency” the Right Way

We all remember the “flux capacitor” from Back to the Future . You’ll have to choose a method of time travel first. You can be creative: The most obvious solution is a time-machine—but remember to ask whether the time machine stays in one place (as in 22/11/63 ), travels with the time traveler (like Back to the Future or Family Guy ) or is simply really weird—in Butterfly Effect , the protagonist has to be reading from his diary to jump in time.

Explaining Paradoxes

Paradoxes occur when things contradict each other; time travel paradoxes are plenty, and often part of the fun when writing it. Just don’t lose track . What counts in one chapter, has to count in another chapter—and if ripples can be felt throughout your storyline because of a character’s reckless time traveling, make sure these ripples in time continuously make sense.

The Grandfather Paradox is a popular example and one best illustrated by Back to the Future . If you go back in time to kill your grandfather, do you effectively kill your father—and thusly yourself? The Hitler Paradox is another example: If you go back in time to kill Hitler, then Hitler doesn’t exist—and you wouldn’t need to kill Hitler in the first place. That’s pretty damned trippy, don’t you think?

The Predestination Paradox is something I’d like to illustrate with a scene from The Matrix , where Neo meets the Oracle; she warns him to look out for the vase. When he asks ‘what vase?’, he knocks it over. This, simply, is when your past self is the very cause of needing to travel back in the first place. This creates an endless loop (hence this also being referred to as a closed causal loop ) of travel.

The Bootstrap Paradox happens when something is sent back (often to the traveler themselves), negating the need for its creation in the first place. Astronomy Trek explains the Bootstrap Paradox in terms of George Lucas going back and giving himself the finished scripts. (Yes, we really had to think about that one, too.)

Taking Notes & Mapping Timelines

Obsessive note-taking is always advised for writing fiction, down to the last little plot detail. Outline beforehand, and have an outline of where your story is going to go. This is the secret to many great authors you’ve likely picked up this week, and there are very few authors who can just pull a plot twist out of nowhere.

When writing time travel, your outlines might have to become a little more focused on timelines and consequences. Create a mind map however you like, even if you have to clothespin some twine across your office and start hanging up notes.

Real Studies in Time Travel (and Real Life Oddities)

Don’t discount real science when writing science fiction . A recent computer simulation managed to come up with a possible solution to the grandfather paradox and even more recent studies have shown that, at least in terms of mathematical theory, time travel is entirely possible . In 2014, scientists studied the behavior of photons beamed through time.

Real-life oddities have also popped up from time to time: John Titor notably posted on internet forums in the early 2000s, claiming that he was a time traveler from the year 2036 who came with the purpose of warning mankind. In 2006, a man called Håkan Nordkvis claimed that he had found a worm-hole through to meet his 72-year old self under his sink—yes, that does remind us just a little of Being John Malkovich , but somehow still not as weird…

About the author

Alex j coyne.

Alex J Coyne is an author, freelance journalist and language practitioner. He has written for international publications and blogs, been featured on radio and appeared in NB Publishers’ Skrik op die Lyf, an Afrikaans horror collection. Visit his website and get in touch at http://alexcoyneofficial.wordpress.com.

22/11/63 was so bad I could barely read it. I gave up on it. The book was written for a reason but it seems sure to me at least it wasn’t to investigate time-travel. Time-travel is a conceit, simple as that – an often dumb idea made somehow interesting whatever paradox it comes up against or overcomes or attempts to overcome.

5 Unique Tips To Write A Time Travel Story

Writing time travel fiction.

What about time travel keeps us coming back to it in our stories? Some of the earliest time travel stories we know are hundreds of years old. Despite all our technological advancements, we continue to write stories about it and a time travel story. One or more characters either deliberately or accidentally gained the ability to travel into the past or future. Within such a story, they may be able to travel at will, or there are limits on how and when they will travel.

There are three main types of time travel stories that you’ll see today. The first type is preserving the status quo. The second is changing the status quo. The third type is time travel tourism. Preserving the status quo means that the hero needs to ensure that a particular action either does or does not occur. The next one, changing the status quo, is where specific past or present actions must be changed to prevent an undesirable outcome.

First and foremost, time travel gives you the power of what if something had happened differently or hadn’t happened. You can attempt to answer these questions by telling a time travel story. It completely contradicts our world, where we can’t change the past or see the future. We can’t press a reset button and try again. I’m fully supportive of people who want to tell these time travel stories as long as it serves their message. So, stay with me if you want to learn more.

How to write a time travel story?

Time travel stories allow the heroes to fix everything in the present with little to no consequences. It leads to lazy stories resolved with a time machine where everything returns to normal. Every decision we make in the real world has lasting consequences and cannot be undone. Despite this, it’s still important to push for change and improvement.

We’re going to talk about writing stories about time travel. These can be tricky because there are so many things to consider, and all-time paradoxes will drive you nuts. But I want to give you 5 tips that’ll simplify the process and help you decide whether you want to write a story about time travel and how you should execute such a story. Let’s travel!

1. Ask yourself

If you are writing about time travel, you need to ask yourself the question Why? Why are you writing about time travel? Often you don’t necessarily need to incorporate time travel elements into your story instead of writing a story about someone going to the past. Maybe you want to write about historical fiction.

Maybe you want to write a story that’s set back there, and you don’t need anybody from the present day in that setting. Or if you’re writing about somebody going to the future, you’re better off writing a story about a future society or the apocalypse.

Often, writers don’t want to write about time travel so much as they want to write about different periods or different futures. So keep that in mind. If you ever are in the situation where you think you have a good idea for a time travel story, ask yourself:

Is the time travel necessary?
What are the characters going to learn from the story?
Why are they going back or forward in time?
What is the purpose of all this?

2. Make decisions and device matter

Timeline is one of my favorite time travel novels for various reasons. At the story’s beginning, a team of archaeologists describes a significant battle. Once the time travel story starts unfolding, the macro details of the battle remain largely unchanged. However, the characters were able to use their future knowledge to nudge the past ever so slightly to make the story worth reading. That’s how to write an incredible time travel story, even when the details were already written in stone.

Also, the time travel vehicle or device matters. One major discrepancy between the book (Timeline) and the movie is that the book gave intention to the date and location that was being traveled to in the past.

On the other hand, in the movie, the scientists accidentally open up a wormhole to a random point in history. Then they recruited archaeologists who happened to be studying the castle that was nearby where the wormhole opened. It made the time travel mechanic of the story largely an accident in which the archaeologists happened to arrive shortly before the pivotal battle they were researching.

If the characters can go to any time or place, there should be a reason why they end up at a specific point, even if it isn’t known to the characters at that time. ‘Doctor Who’ does a wonderful job with this, where the TARDIS, the mechanism that they travel through time and space, is sentient and sends the doctor into harm’s way on an episodic basis.

3. Set a goal and give lessons

Characters who make time jumps there they’re going to learn some lessons. Maybe they go to the past and learn to appreciate the future more. Or they go to the future and learn to change themselves before the world becomes a worse place. When you start writing a time travel story. So, set an individual goal to achieve and give some lessons or experience while the characters are on their mission.

Readers don’t like stories where characters know what will happen to them. There was a critically acclaimed space opera, which I never enjoyed for various reasons, but the primary one was that the character knew their future.

All sense of drama about the character surviving was removed when the tension was automatically diffused for every trial. In the early part of the Harry Potter series, I understand why the characters couldn’t use time travel as they might mistake it for the work of an evil wizard. That makes sense. However, once they learned about time travel, they should have used it to their advantage.

4. Establish time travel rules

Another essential thing to remember is to establish the rules of time travel in your story. Who is capable of time travel? How many people can use time travel? Is there a specific device you need, or is there a magic spell? What are the consequences of using time travel? What if they get stuck in time? Can they get stuck in time?

All those different questions need to be asked and answered by the writer before you get into the storytelling. If you don’t understand the rules of time travel in your story, your readers will see through it. They’re going to see it as a fake story they’re not going to get into. You want to sell the idea, and you need to stick to the rules if you do that.

If something happened to a time traveler in the past, then it would have already happened. So when they return to the present and go home and go to sleep, there shouldn’t be a shift in time around them after a given, unspecified, inconsistent amount of time has passed. The biggest thing I’ll say about time travel rules is that they need to remain consistent.

There are plenty of time travel stories that selectively apply. Whatever their self-contained rules are set, the plot can continue and then ignore them whenever it doesn’t affect the plot. Failing to think about the what fully or why of time travel or applying it unravels these stories.

5. Focus on the primary trope

How seriously do you want to take time travel in your story? It’s fine if you want to write a story about time travel and its fun and lighthearted trope. Also, it doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of how it works. For instance, the story Groundhog Day is about Bill Murray reliving the same day over and over again until he finally becomes a better person. They never explain how time travel works in that story or why it exists. But nobody complains about that because it’s a great story.

However, if you are writing a much more serious and scientific story, you will want to do your research and get your details correct because those types of audiences will be much more critical of you. It’ll take them right out of the story if you get anything wrong.

Types Of Time Travel Stories (Tropes/Prompts)

Once you establish your story rules, you must decide what type of time travel story you will write. There are hundreds of time travel tropes, but none are more important than the message of your story. It’s important to consider setting limits on time travel or what it costs the hero. What could potentially stop you from being able to time travel? Maintain these limits throughout your stories.

Finding the balance between complete freedom and structure in your story is a good idea. Your story may be better served with a degree of logic added. So, it’s essential to consider the sociological implications of time travel in your world and how they affect your characters and the world you’ve built. Here are 4 types of time travel stories/tropes you can use in your story.

Travel to the past.
Travel to the future.
Present is invaded.
Time travel gimmicks.

Travel to past

The most common one is the story where someone from the present goes back in time to the past. If you are writing this type of story, you’re writing a historical fiction story with a sci-fi twist because you include that time travel.

To write a great historical fiction story, you must research the period you’re writing about. You need to be very knowledgeable about it. What was the technology and the world in general? What kind of expectations did they have for the future? What were the social customs? If you are writing a story about the past, you should find a way to get your readers invested in that time period. One of the best ways to do it is to get the details right and get a good feel for this story world.

Try to present life as it was so your readers could truly appreciate it. One major thing to be aware of when writing stories about characters who go to the past is the butterfly effect. If you have a time traveler who goes to the past, every change they make to this world will have consequences for the future.

If you do have people going into the past, remember that if they kill someone or prevent someone from being killed, that will have consequences in the future. So keep that in mind.

Travel to future

The next type of time travel story is one where characters go from the present into the future, and they may go into the future for various reasons. Maybe they go from the inferno of it because they invented the time machine that can take them into the future. Or, they might have to go to the future to stop some future evil from occurring.

Typically, those stories can get a little foolish because you have to ask yourself some questions. If they must go into the future to stop evil from happening, why don’t they take precautions now? Or why don’t they wait for the future to come to them?

So if you are looking at this type of story, ask yourself: Is it necessary for future time travel to happen? Aside from time travel stories, your main characters go into the past or future.

Present is invaded

Your characters stay in the present, and another character, usually a villain, comes to the present, either from the future or the past, and starts causing problems. The best example of this is Terminator one, an eighties movie that takes place during the eighties. But the main conflict arises because a machine comes from the future to kill Sarah Connor in the present. There isn’t much worldbuilding early on, and we can instantly empathize with Sarah Connor. It’s another technique you can keep in your arsenal.

If you are thinking about time travel stories, be aware that you do have to do the proper worldbuilding for the future or the past, even if you’re bringing one or two characters into that present.

Time travel gimmick

The fourth and final type of time travel story is one where there is a time travel gimmick involved. For instance, in the movie Groundhog Day, the gimmick is that Bill Murray’s character repeats the same day repeatedly until he becomes a better person.

Another example would be the video game, The Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask. It is about a fantasy world about to be destroyed in three days when the moon crashes into Earth. However, the main character can play the ocarina to go back in time three days and repeat the process until he can finally solve the problem.

We can tell stories based on a world that exists in a hypothetical parallel universe to our own, one that could technically exist. It adds a degree of commitment missing from most time travel stories. Every decision your characters make last within the world that they’re in. Even if they leave that world, the decisions are still there. Also, some people need to live with the consequences of those actions.

When writing a story, sharing your work with a group of people you trust for feedback is essential. It can be beneficial for others to read your work because they can give you ideas for improvement that you had never even considered. So, I encourage you to create a group of people you trust where you can share your stories and ultimately be creative.

What is your all-time favorite time travel story? Let me know in the comments section below.

Learn more from books:

17 Time Travel Romance Books

10 Post Apocalyptic Romance

10 Medieval Romance Novels

15 Historical Romance Books

More writing tips:

10 Tips To Write Male Characters

10 Tips To Write A Woman Character

10 Tips For Naming Characters In A Book

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The Writer's Workout

Be a better writer..

Susan Matteucci
Dec 22, 2022

Tips and Tricks to Writing Time Travel Into Your Story

Time travel and time manipulation is a very common conflict in science fiction, fantasy, and even more action-based genres of fiction. However, despite it being so common, it is possibly one of the hardest supernatural qualities to write effectively into a story.

Time travel can be very confusing, and you can lose your readers if you are not careful about how you approach it. Not only that, but since time travel has been done so many times, authors may feel the need to be original in their works which can cause even more confusion.

However, writing time travel can be fun and easy if you know what you’re dealing with! When writing a story with any sort of time manipulation, make sure you first answer the question: what are the rules of time travel in my story? Once you’ve asked this, there are common writing tips that can help you write these rules effectively into your story.

Rules of Time Travel

Before we worry about what your characters understand, let’s focus on you, the writer. Before writing a story with time travel, we want to make sure that you understand exactly the type of time travel you are writing (there are many different kinds!).

But what exactly is a rule of time travel? Well, since you’re the one writing the story, the rules are what you make them. However, there are common types of time travel that writers tend to fall into, whether they are trying or not.

The Different Types of Time Travel:

When discussing time travel, there are four categories to choose from:

Traveling back in time

Traveling forward in time

The gift of foresight

Of course, within each of these categories, there are many subcategories and creative possibilities. But looking only at the broad strokes, every time travel story has one of these.

In choosing which type of time travel to include, it’s important to consider what you want from your story. A story of time loops, like Groundhog Day , usually focuses on the character development of the person in the loop. Meanwhile foresight and traveling forward usually deal with morality. And traveling to the past is a great way to discuss free will. It’s all about what you want.

There are so many options with time travel. The important thing is to find the type of time travel that fits your story best, create rules for it, and stick to those rules . This leads us to the first tip in writing time travel:

Consistency

These rules are just for you. You don’t necessarily need to tell your readers about them. There’s no need for some sort of exposition explanation (although if you want to, feel free). But deciding what time travel can and can’t do in your story will stop plot holes from forming. Keeping your time travel consistent is important.

For example, let’s look at Supernatural . Supernatural is great at giving us examples of what not to do.

In season 4 of Supernatural , Dean Winchester is sent back in time to when his parents were his age. Dean attempts to kill a demon that will kill his mother in the future. At the end, he fails and ultimately causes the events that will happen (classic unchangeable past time travel rules). Castiel tells him that it is impossible to change the present by traveling to the past.

We then jump to season five. Anna, a runaway angel, goes back in time to kill Sam and Dean’s parents before they can have Sam. Castiel and the brothers become worried about this. But why? If we can’t alter the past, then what’s the problem? Even if Anna doesn’t realize her goals are futile, why would Castiel be concerned?

Backstory :

This leads us to our next point. After you decide your own time travel rules, you have to consider how much each character knows about these rules . If you have decided that a seer has unchangeable visions, and they know this, then that character should never try to change their fate.

The time travel rule of Twelve Monkeys is that you cannot change the past. However, the movie only has a plot because the main character doesn’t know this. He believes he can change the past until the very end when he realizes his goal is fruitless.

However, the Prisoner of Azkaban has the same rules of time travel and Dumbledore and Hermione both know they can’t change the past. There is still conflict in the book because that is not their goal.

If a character has a backstory where they studied time travel for years, and has traveled hundreds of times before, they shouldn’t be shocked by the rules of time travel. Withholding the information from your characters can create interesting conflict, but make sure each character understands a plausible amount.

Show, Don’t Tell:

Having your characters have a long conversation about time travel can be fun to write, but it’s important to remember that the best way to ensure your audience understands time travel is to show characters traveling through time .

As long as you stick to your rules, your time travel will eventually make sense to your audience. And, when it comes to time travel, you’d be surprised just how long your readers will be okay with being in the dark.

In Avengers: Endgame , Hulk/Bruce Banner goes on a long explanation about how time travel works in this universe. They bring up Hot Tub Time Machine and Back to the Future . But in the end, did anyone in the audience completely understand what that time travel was about from the Hulk’s rant? From what I can gather, no.

About the Author: Susan Matteucci is an author, editor, and reader currently finishing up her BFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College. She has two publish short stories and hopefully has many more on the way. She has a passion for Sci-Fi, particularly time travel, and fantasy. It is her belief that straying from the realistic is the best way to comment on society.

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How to Write a Time Travel Story Without Paradoxes

The concept of time travel has long been a popular theme in fiction and film. Traveling back in time to alter the course of history is an alluring idea that has enthralled not just fiction writers but scientists as well. Yet, if you've ever seen or read a time travel story, you're aware that time travel is a tricky concept to grasp. It might be challenging to stay faithful to your worldbuilding concepts while simultaneously incorporating suitable temporal paradoxes.

For this reason, we will explore different paradoxes and go through various tips to help you write a time travel story without the risk of paradoxes.

Where does the idea of time travel come from?

Traveling across time is a shared universal dream. But where did the fascination with time travel begin, and why does the concept appeal to so many people? The lure of time travel has deeper origins. Appearing in some of our oldest stories , it is woven into the very fabric of our language and imagines a world without constraints of time and space. Its roots may be traced back to ancient tales of time travel found in numerous civilizations throughout the world, giving the notion its distinct characteristics derived from different cultures.

We come across time travel stories in ancient cultures throughout the world , although we cannot claim to know where the concept originally came from and who pioneered it. However, we can observe that the genre rose to prominence in the nineteenth century. From this time period comes Charles Dickens' classic novella A Christmas Carol , in which Ebenezer Scrooge travels both ahead and backwards in time. Around the same period, H.G. Wells popularized time travel in literature with his timeless novel The Time Machine , which featured the concept of a "time machine," which featured a vehicle that could travel purposefully and selectively in time. Inspired by this emblematic icon, many beloved time-travel stories published after this have incorporated some form of the time machine. Such is the famous TARDIS in the long-running BBC classic series Doctor Who , a blue box that can transcend time and space. Doctor who interestingly explores time travel paradoxes, with time paradoxes taking a center stage for many of its episodes.

Time travel paradoxes

There are many logical contradictions when it comes to time travel. Here are some of the major paradoxes:

Bootstrap paradox

The Bootstrap Paradox is a theoretical paradox of time travel that arises when an object transported back in time becomes locked within an unending cause-effect loop. This occurs as the travel in time takes place as a response to a specific event.

Consistency paradox

Consistency Paradoxes , such as the Grandfather Paradox , or the Hitler paradox , a type of timeline mismatch that arises from the prospect of changing the past. These paradoxes change history in such a way that time travel into the past, which caused such action in the first place, is no longer possible. To simply illustrate the paradox, in the film The Time Machine , a protagonist builds a time machine to travel back in time in order to save his fiancé from death. Her rescue, on the other hand, would lead to a future in which the machine never existed since her death was the direct motivation for its creation. But then, how is it you can go back and save your fiancé if her death hasn't given you the push to create the time machine? It results in a paradox. The timeline is no longer self-consistent.

Butterfly effect

The Butterfly Effect is based on Chaos Theory , which states that seemingly minor changes may have massive cascade responses over extended periods of time and that even minor changes can fundamentally reshape history. The name "Butterfly Effect" originates from Ray Bradbury's short tale " A Sound of Thunder ," in which a character in prehistoric times walks on a butterfly, causing massive changes in the future.

How to avoid these paradoxes

The self-healing hypothesis.

Writers seeking to escape the paradoxes of time travel have devised a variety of inventive methods for presenting a more consistent picture of reality. The self-healing hypothesis is one of the most basic solutions to any time travel paradox, implying that no matter what is changed in the timeline, the principles of quantum physics will self-correct to prevent a contradiction from arising and sustain the existing flow .

Because events would adapt themselves, a paradox would not occur. So, changing the past will trigger another alternative chain reaction that will keep the present unaltered. This effectively states that the likelihood of a paradox arising in any given circumstance is zero. The self-healing hypothesis simply indicates that no matter what a traveler has done in the past, the end outcome is the same in terms of global conditions. This does not rule out the possibility of changing the past, but it does eliminate the prospect of minor changes having the power to generate massive ones. Most crucially, as an author, you are not obligated to describe the particular events that repair time. It is enough to affirm that they take place and ensure that your event sequences and their conclusion are consistent.

Time traveling monitor

Another way to avoid temporal paradox would be creating the time traveling monitor that would follow the timeline protection hypothesis , which posits that any attempt to create a paradox would fail to owe to a probability distortion. The monitor would adjust the probability in order to avert any damaging events occurring, which would also give you free rein to come up with creative scenarios. Nonetheless, to prevent an impossible event from taking place, the universe must favor an improbable event occurring.

Balancing the timeline

The paradoxes themselves are intertwined and they can as well occur simultaneously. No one knows if a real-life paradox would result in a large-scale timeline alteration, or if the closed-loop is kind of automatically self-correcting since everything works out equally in the end. Going back to the Consistency Paradox, yet another approach to avoid it is to acknowledge, regretfully, that you can't and shouldn't attempt to change the past. That is unless you can rule out any chance of a bad domino effect as a result of your activities. In this manner, you can attempt to alter the past while keeping the chronology intact. This means following up the time-change event with another change that balances out the activities and ensures that the outcome remains the same despite the intervention.

The notion of a time loop is one of the most prevalent strategies to get away with time travel in science fiction. You may travel through time here, but any changes you make are predetermined. For example, suppose you were pushed out of the way of a car one day. You return to your timeline from the future and realize that that person was in reality you.

Paradoxes are avoided with this method of time travel, but everything is predetermined. If you wish to prevent a tragic incident from occurring in your past, there's nothing you can do since even if you could, it would still happen in the time loop. Whatever you did, the key events would just re-calibrate around you. This could be the solution for the Grandfather Paradox — that would mean that the event propelling you back in time would happen regardless of your actions, providing your younger self with the incentive to go back and stop it. To put it another way, a time traveler could make adjustments, but the original conclusion would still occur — perhaps not exactly as it did in the initial timeline, but near enough.

Parallel universe

There is also another possibility: creating a parallel universe . The future or past you visit might become a parallel reality. Consider it as a huge fortress where you may construct or demolish as many castles as you like, but it has no bearing on your primal stronghold. When you travel back in time, the future is gone, it never happened, and the universe will evolve anew, even if you do nothing to influence it. It does not affect the future you experienced, but it does affect the future of the reset world. That can entail creating a scenario in which the protagonists travel to the past and discover themselves in a parallel world or multiverse, with no change to their original chronology.

Countless science fiction stories have examined the conundrum of what would happen if you could travel back in time and do something that would jeopardize the future. Please note that you are free to make your own rules for it. This is your work of fiction. The universe will be as you will design it in your story. If the paradoxes do not exist in your story, then you may make up your own rules around it. You can as well bypass the rules your worldbuilding has established if you have a valid cause for doing so and if this is what your writing demands.

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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SoYouWantTo/WriteATimeTravelStory

So You Want To / Write a Time-Travel Story

Edit locked, necessary tropes.

So You Want To Write a Science Fiction Story - Time-Travel stories are often a Sub-Genre of Science Fiction (and for that reason, this guide, may also be useful to you), but if you are not inclined towards science or physics, and what draws you to this type of story is the kinds of strange adventures you can explore, perhaps you may want to look into some Fantasy, Science Fantasy or even Urban Fantasy concepts, after all, magic can cause users to time-travel in some stories. But, if you’re playing with Soft Sci-Fi, or Science Fantasy, a lot of what I have to say here is much more loosely applicable, as Soft Sci-Fi often plays hard and fast with scientific concepts and research. However, if you are more interested in something with a semblance of scientific fortitude, then it’s good to look at some of the fundamentals of writing Science-Fiction before specifically looking into the time-travel aspect of such stories.
Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness - Writing always has some challenge, but I am not referring to hard/easy difficulty, so much as just how much science you want in your fiction. If you want to explore more scientific concepts, of causality, paradox & relativity, and you’re interested in the mechanics of divergent time-streams and other pseudo-scientific principles, then you’re likely hoping to explore Hard Sci-Fi. However, if you’re not as interested in the science and physics as much as the story and the adventure, the unusual time-periods - dinosaurs and robots - then you’re probably wanting to write something that is Soft Sci-Fi, which means you needn’t stress too hard about figuring out the science-fiction theory - heck, this may not be science-fiction at all! You can have a Fantasy or Science Fantasy story, using magic to travel through time.
Pros: One of the benefits of this is that it often means that the person is displaced literally just in time - especially if the portal travels to “itself” - the person steps through the portal, and steps out of the same portal in the same place, but a different time period (although this is not necessary ). This is useful not only for travellers to get their bearings, but it means that the Portal cannot be stolen (although, it is possible that it may be taken over ). For dramatic purposes, having the portal stay still can add to the tension, because it means that in order to deal with any problems happening in any particular time-period, your traveller must physically remove themselves from the location of the portal in order to go anywhere, which can add tension if they ever want to use the portal to change the period they reside in, or even simply to get back home. Another benefit is that this type of time travel may be “naturally occurring”, which means it doesn’t require a device to work at all - fantastic if you don’t want your main character to be a scientist of some sort. It may be a wormhole, or even simply a “time slip” in a room, a crack in a rock, or an empowered patch of wheat in a field somewhere, removing any need for a time machine inventor, if you wish.
Cons: The detriments of these portals, is that they can often have limited control. For instance, with a naturally-occurring time portal, whilst, you may travel through the portal, or back, it means you can only visit two pre-determined time-periods - when you were, and when you end up. Even if the portal is in the control of some “portal device”, it may mean that a traveller is unable to travel to any time before such a portal was invented, as otherwise there will be no portal device on the other side to step through to, meaning it either will not work , or any attempts will cause... dysfunction . Which brings up another issue, can the time portal be opened or closed? Even if the portal doesn’t require a device to “contain” it, this can still mean that if a portal closes after a traveller steps through, they may be stuck in whatever time they just stepped into, with no way back - or , they may even be left at the mercy of those controlling the portal back home to re-open the doorway and allow them back, which may add a ticking-clock element to a time-travel story if they must locate the returning portal at a certain time ; or even a certain place , creating a road trip plot where they must get to the new location of the return portal, in order to get back home.
Pros: The benefits of a time vehicle are that the vehicle itself is often a Cool Ride , and it can not only be very viscerally exciting for your audience, but it can also lead to many merchandising opportunities on your part (if you’re into that kind of thing). The design of a time vehicle can even be thematically, aesthetically or narratively relevant to your story, like the iconically British phonebox visage of the TARDIS from the BBC’s Doctor Who , or Emmett Brown’s cheap, modified DeLorean, from Back to the Future with its iconic gull-wing doors and many plot-relevant operating issues, or even the classic look of the time-travelling sled from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine , which is “technically” a vehicle, but cannot be physically moved under its own power. As well, the fact that time vehicles move means that they have an advantage for the user, as they will have transport and perhaps even some protection within their vehicle. Of course, if the machine is a space-ship, then that opens up several more possibilities for potential stories , exploring Space Opera tropes and aliens; but this is true of many forms the vehicle may take, be it a time-travelling tank , a time-travelling racecar or even, dare I suggest, a time-travelling Giant Mecha ? This often also includes the benefit that the time traveller usually has more control over their vehicle, and may be free to choose the place and time they wish to travel to, opening up a whole timeline of possibilities for their adventures (although, again, there’s no guarantee).
Cons: However, the time vehicle is not without flaws. Namely time vehicles are notoriously difficult to operate, as time travel is often a highly-precise ; energy-intensive ; resource-heavy or even violent operation, which can lead to dysfunction , malfunction or tragedy if the time traveller isn’t fully versed in the safe operation of the vehicle. This also means that a time vehicle is prone to breaking, meaning that a traveller may be forced to fix the vehicle before they can Get Back to the Future . Also, if your vehicle is too uniquely designed, it may be conspicuous and attract a lot of attention in certain time periods - even if it’s not unique, if a device is taken to a time before that vehicle was invented (such as, taking an aeroplane to medieval times), you may not only confuse and scare the locals but possibly even cause a temporal paradox on sight , and travelling to the future in a machine which is outdated may be ''just'' as conspicuous . Another issue is that if the time machine is a single device which travels with you, then the traveller is at the most risk in the event that their vehicle is commandeered by someone with ill intent , as they will have lost their only means of returning to their domestic time-period .
Pros: This obviously has the benefit that it requires less preparation on the part of the user, they not only do not need to drive a vehicle, but they don’t even have to take a single step, they simply need to activate the ability. It also means that their travel can be more inconspicuous, so long as they travel to a place and time where persons like them existed (although they may have to change their clothing so as to fit in ), and don’t do so in the middle of a crowded street. This form of time-travel is also the least susceptible to theft, especially if the ability is natural/biological making theft highly improbable (but not impossible). Also, whilst time travel can be just as difficult no matter the device used, as the time jumper often requires either innate ability or a compact device, the time travel mechanics are usually much simpler or safer to operate, in order to allow for a single person to travel unprotected, and/or for the mechanism itself to be so compact. This also means that they often have a low energy cost and/or resource drain, requiring low - or no - maintenance.
Cons: There are, of course, some downsides. Firstly, the fact that the traveller is so exposed means that there are some places which will be much harder, if not impossible to journey to, such as into a warzone, or anywhere with radiation or extreme heat, cold or weather, any place without an immediate ground to stand upon & anywhere lacking atmosphere; and the very instant that the traveller materializes/appears in their chosen time, they are vulnerable to any present dangers. Also, if this is a natural/innate ability, then precision is generally much harder to achieve, meaning that a person may only be able to jump forward or backward several dozen, hundred or thousand years at a time (or, in some cases, they may only be able to make small jumps forward or back a few minutes or hours, depending on the scope of the story). But, even if precision is possible, there’s still the issue that this kind of travel often limits the travelling capacity to ‘one’, meaning that if the traveller makes any friends ( or lovers ) along the way, or they wish to save someone from their fate/destiny , they probably won’t be able to simply stow them away on their return journey, and thus all problems faced in any time-period must be solved in the present moment (relatively speaking). Also, on the rare but nonetheless possible occasion that such a device does break, it may take some incredibly precise skills and technical efforts to repair, if it’s not entirely impossible to repair at all - especially if this is some innate or biological ability, as depending on its mechanism it may require surgical expertise, physiotherapy, biochemistry or, in some cases, mental or psychiatric care in order to be “repaired”. Also, this form moreso than the others is the most prone to giving the time-traveller no control at all as to when a time jump is initiated, or in which time period they will arrive .
Mental Time Travel : This is when a person cannot travel physically, and can only take their memories/thoughts with them , and often requires them to possess the body of someone who does physically exist in that time. This may mean that a traveller is confined to their own lifetime, only able to possess the mind of their past or future self; but this sometimes allows the traveller to invade the mind and body of a contemporary of the time they travel to, à la Quantum Leap .
The Slow Path : when someone either simply waits for the future to come, or occasionally is placed/imprisoned in stasis or in a time-dilation field for a long period of time, getting to the future that way. This is often the most scientifically accurate form of time-travel, but it limits travel to a one-way trip.
Love Transcends Spacetime : This is more common in Soft Sci-Fi, and may result in The Power of Love allowing a time-displaced couple to reunite. It takes many forms, as it is more a magical concept, so I won’t go into explicit detail, except to say that unless you’re writing a Romance, this is a weird choice...
Adventures in the Bible : Someone travels to the past, to experience or re-enact a well-known story from history (often a biblical one, hence the trope name, but not necessarily).
Back to the Early Installment : The characters in an established story use time-travel to return to a previous point in that story, such as an earlier chapter, episode, instalment or series.
Christmas Every Day : A story where Christmas (or another holiday/special occasion) repeats every day - often used to teach some kind of moral about that day’s importance, but not necessarily.
Conqueror from the Future : A conqueror from the future goes back in time to start his conquest in the past.
Future Self Reveal : Someone is revealed to be the future version of someone else.
Get Back to the Future : Someone gets stuck in the past and has to find their way back.
Godwin's Law of Time Travel : Someone tries to change the past, and ends up creating an alternate history where the Nazis won - this is worryingly easy to do in fiction.
"Groundhog Day" Loop : Someone - or a group of people - gets stuck repeating the same day.
Ominous Message from the Future : Someone from the future send a message back in time, warning that something bad is going to happen.
Precrime Arrest : Someone is arrested for a crime they haven't even committed yet.
Set Right What Once Went Wrong : Using time travel to undo bad events/consequences from history.
Terminator Twosome : Two people go back in time, one to change history and one to stop them.
Time Police : People who either outlaw time travel or enforce laws related to time travel.
Time-Travel Romance : Falling in love with someone from another time.
Trapped in the Past : Someone ends up in the past without knowing how to come back.
You Will Be Beethoven : Someone travels to a significant historical event, whereby the historical figure at the centre of that event dies (or never existed) and realizes that in order for the timeline to remain intact, they will have to "be" that person.

Levels of Time-Line Mutability

Pros : This is light on temporal mechanics, since it requires a perfectly stable time-loop, and deviation from the set path is inherently impossible. It also appears to be the most scientifically consistent form of time-travel, as (in part due to the Anthropic Principle), we’ve only ever experienced time happening one way, so it makes sense that there is only one timeline. It can also be satisfying for the viewer to see, out of order, how exactly you tie up every loose thread of your story to stabilize the timeloop (assuming you DO tie up all the loose threads ).
Cons : Writing a story that sidesteps paradoxes doesn’t always satisfy reader curiosity. Sure, you avoided the Grandfather Paradox when the grandson’s assassination attempt failed, but that doesn’t actually address the paradox, so it can leave some readers wondering about what might have happened , instead of paying attention to the plot. Similarly, the fact that time is unchangeable brings up issues of why the main characters bothered to travel through time in the first place... you can’t exactly Set Right What Once Went Wrong if the timeline is fixed and unchanging. This often results in plots where ignorance or naivete is the driving force behind most time-travel, which can turn your story into an Idiot Plot . Also, the fixed timeline may evoke the creeping realization that we have no willpower, freedom of choice or hope of escaping our inevitable destiny , which can really bum some viewers out.
The Rubber Timeline - In this case, there is one time-line and you cannot change the past, because if you try, the timeline will adjust to correct itself. The name says it all, as much as you try to push against it, it just pushes back. This can take two forms, the rubber ball and the rubber band . To explain them, let’s look at the example of the Grandfather Paradox .
Pros : This resolves the issue of the Butterfly of Doom , whereby any action taken in the past could have catastrophic consequences, since any minor missteps in the past will be resolved by the time you get back home. Also, this kind of change appears to be giving Time itself a will and perhaps even a personality (perhaps playful, perhaps vindictive), as time itself is acting against your changes to fix it, which can help with the tone of your story. It’s also suitable for Soft Sci-Fi or Fantasy stories, especially if you don’t want to deal with Alternate History .
Cons : Just as with the Fixed Timeline, this may bring up daunting questions regarding free will, meaning & hope in a universe with an unchanging future. Also, depending on how characters act in the past, you may need to explain why killing George Washington didn’t change history as we know it , or why we don’t see time bounce back against changes happening in the present. For these reasons, many writers are forced to combine a Rubber Timeline with some other form of timeline, implying that time can change, but only if you do something significant, which is not a point in favour of this kind of timeline, you have to alter its mutability just to make it work.
Pros : This has all the pros of the fixed timeline that you have stable time loops and avoid paradoxes without the con of predestination paradoxes or loss of free will and choice, since the characters still have agency to choose. But if they make the wrong choice, it might destroy time/life/reality as we know it. Another advantage is that the way the timeline breaks may be interesting to explore. There have even been stories/chapters/episodes which start with time being broken, so as to explore what a world is like with broken time, and challenge the heroes to fix it (or endure its inevitable destruction). This can also set a tense atmosphere for your story, since it means characters won’t travel back in time unless it is worth the extreme risk .
Cons : If the destruction of time is too catastrophic, or you reuse the threat of its destruction too many times , then it can lend your characters some Plot Armour , as the audience realizes there’s still so many pages, or so much run-time, left, so obviously the universe has to continue for at least that much longer (although you could be all avant-garde, and end your story by leaving the last half blank after a time-wipe). And if you want your characters to break the fragile timeline during the course of your story, you’ll need to find some way of breaking time that suits your story and doesn’t feel like something you’re making up just so you can get to the next chapter already .
The Branching Timeline - In this case, there is one time-line, and you can change the past, but doing so creates a second timeline. This resolves paradoxes by simply saying that any paradoxical events happened in the other timeline. This resolves some issues, but there’s two main ways to have a branching timeline perform, either with the original branches are pruned and left crooked , or the branches split .
Pros : This kind of timeline resolves the paradoxes by giving you more timeline to work with, and it can create the classic Set Right What Once Went Wrong scenario, as well as give you the chance to explore alternate histories without having to rewrite your story’s canon (unless you want to). Also, if you use the split timeline version, it can create some fascinating stories as well as narrative structures, switching between, especially if you have the two timelines interact somehow - it’s even been used in non-science fiction stories . And if you create several split time-lines, you might even create a Multiverse !
Cons : If you create several split time-lines, you might even create a Multiverse . Alternate History can be confusing at the best of times, but Alternate Continuity is almost impossible to wrangle, even with several writers at the helm, and some readers find it overwhelming. But even without a multiverse, the split timeline creates the issue that you still can’t actually change the timeline, since any attempt leaves the timeline as it was, and creates a new, different timeline. Which reality is actually real ? And you might need to consider, if a villain changes history, and you go back and stop them, are you actually “repairing history” or simply “creating a third timeline branch in which you won”, effectively leaving behind two branches of reality where you failed .
Pros : It means the audience can more easily relate to the characters as they feel contemporary, no matter when you start reading. It also helps to set the tone for a less-realistic story or cartoon, especially for a Long Running Series
Cons : It makes literally no sense if you try to understand how the timeline works , and it punishes long-time fans for bothering to remember older publications of your story. Unless you want to attempt to make sense of it all... Also, some attempts to appeal to modern audiences can fall flat .
Pros : This allows for a much more fun, free and adventurous story, as you don’t need to worry too much about timeline consistency - you can use the rules which suit the chapter or episode of your story as you see fit, to make it work. It can fit well into a Soft Sci-Fi or Fantasy story very well, and it can be used for comedy. It also means that if two of the timeline concepts appeal to you, but you can’t decide, you can easily use them both. A timeline may be fixed, until some catastrophic cosmic event causes it to branch apart. Perhaps a timeline is rubbery and self-healing, but if you stretch it too far it branches off into several timelines. Or perhaps the timeline is brittle, but when you accidentally break it, you realize it’s actually been fixed all along and completely unchanging. Or, a timeline could be a branching timeline, but as you split it too far, it weakens reality and becomes brittle. There’s much more freedom to play with concepts, if you don’t want to follow strict rules.
Cons : Some readers like Rules. It doesn’t matter if your science device can cause you to create matter out of thin air, or uses perpetual motion machines, oe even magic, some readers are willing to suspend suspension of disbelief so long as the unrealistic effects remain consistent . Similarly, this does work best with a more light-hearted tone. That’s not to say you can’t have darker or more serious stories with a Wibbly-Wobbly Timeball, but if there’s more freedom to affect the flow of time, it might be harder to explain why you can’t go back and stop your mother’s death, whilst you can go back and punch Hitler in the face. But, if you do start trying to explain how this stuff “works”, it can easily degrade into Continuity Porn if you go too far, turning a concept designed to sidestep all this overthinking, and turn it into an exercise in excessive over-rethinking.

Paradox Events

What is a causal paradox.

To clap your hands : The Cause is swiftly colliding your hands together, the Effect is a loud “smack” sound.

To kick a ball : The Cause is your foot colliding with the ball at speed, the Effect is the ball moving.

This is not only necessary for understanding consequence, but also physics. Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that “For every Action there is an Equal and Opposite Reaction”. Clapping your hands with force results in a soundwave (W) with force equivalent to the clapping force’s kinetic energy (Wk) through the potential energy (Wp) of the medium, in this case air (W = Wp + Wk); Kicking a ball with force 𝑦 results in the ball moving at a speed of (mass x acceleration) equivalent to that force (F=ma). So, Cause not only leads to Effect, it should also equal Effect, at least in the context of “work”. I’m not a physicist (and don’t worry, I’m going to stop with the sciencey/mathsy jargon now), but what matters is that you can’t get something for nothing , as it has to balance out somehow. And more importantly, perhaps just as importantly, an Effect can itself be the Cause of another Effect in a Causal Chain. Line up dominoes and tip the first. This causes the first to collide with the next, with the effect of it tipping over; which causes it to collide with the next, with the effect of tipping that one over; causing it to collide with another, again and again until the last piece falls over in the line. These are the fundamentals of causality. Causal Paradoxes break this rule, by having Effect precede Cause; Effects without Causes or, in some cases, disruption of these fundamental Causal Chains. So, what kind of Paradoxes can result?

Consistency Paradox (or, “Grandfather Paradox”)

This one is the most well-known, but it’s also the most common (and easiest to understand). The example given is always the grandfather. If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before either of your parents are born, then due to the disruption of your ancestry, you can’t be born, and therefore don’t exist. Which begs the question, if you don’t exist... how can you kill your grandfather (what caused that effect)? Now, with apologies to all the nice grandfathers out there, the purpose of this avocide isn’t out of malice, but a thought experiment. But any equivalent action that prevents the Cause after the Effect would be a “grandfather paradox”. If you went back in time, and killed your grand mother , same paradox; if you went back in time and stole the phlebotinum needed to build the time machine, same paradox; if you went back in time and (somehow) sterilized your grandfather, same paradox; if you went back in time and tripped yourself before you stepped into the time machine, same paradox, & even if you went back in time and caused World War III, resulting in the destruction of your native country, meaning that nobody could have been born there, including you… also same paradox. This is the most common paradox as it’s the easiest to fall into by mistake, since if you go back in time “for a reason”, then by resolving the problem you are also removing the need to go back in time in the first place, creating this paradox once again. Consider a common one - Kill Hitler - Adolf Hitler is one of History’s most infamous tyrants and genocidal maniacs, and that has inspired a lot of people to say, if they had a time machine, they would go and kill Hitler. But, if you go back in time and Kill Hitler as a baby… then Hitler doesn’t exist, doesn’t create that history, meaning that by travelling in time, you remove the desire to travel back in time in the first place.

Ontological Paradox (or, “Bootstrap Paradox”)

You go to your garage, and discover a time machine there
You go back in time (Adventure Ensues…).
You arrive back at your house, five minutes before you left.
Since you had so much fun, you park the time machine in your garage for you to find.
You go to your garage, and discover Time Machine blueprints there
You build the time machine from metal, wiring and Phlebotinum from the local store
You go back in time (Adventure Ensues…)
Since you had so much fun, you copy the instructions to build a time machine in a notebook that says “Time Machine blueprints” in your garage for you to find.

It’s a perfect time loop... but that’s the problem. Who invented the time machine? Sure, all the matter is accounted for, but where did the idea come from? Remember, you can’t get something for nothing, so how can you learn something (especially something as complex as time-machine construction), without it ever being discovered? This kind of paradox is also known as a Causal Loop, since it has no definitive starting cause in the loop of recurrent events, implying that “the loop caused itself”. Causal Loops apply to any effect without a definitive cause, not just ideas for inventing time machines. A lot of works of fiction use this as a joke, where some famous quote, lesson, song, joke or concept gets explained to the “creator” by the time traveller. But, if the time traveller learnt it because it was passed down through culture over time by the creator, and the creator learned it because the time-traveller told them… who learnt it first?

Fermi Paradox : The discrepancy between the high potential for the existence of aliens, compared with the rarity of evidence for aliens. Often expressed simply as "if aliens exist, why haven't we found any yet?". Whilst Enrico Fermi initially used this to refer to the possibility of alien life, the same paradox holds true for time travel. Namely, "if time travel where possible, where are all the time travel tourists?"
Imaginary Time : This is a mathematical representation of time in special relativity, which posits the existence of a temporal dimension which runs perpendicular to time, as we experience it, effectively creating two-dimensional time (note: this goes deep down the quantum mechanics rabbithole, so it may be a bit advanced if you're not an advanced physics student).
Novikov Self-Consistency Principle : This is a principle which asserts that temporal paradoxes are impossible. It was proposed by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov. In all honesty, whilst he wrote a book about the subject of "closed timelike curves", this principle was little more than his opinion, but it sounds good for technobabble.
Ontological : Regarding one's being, or existence. As existence is often referred to as temporal, time travel has the potential for bringing up ontological dilemmas.
Retrocausality : Relating to a cause which comes after its effect.
San Dimas Time : An arbitrary, or artificial, sense of urgency during a time travel story, despite the fact that the ability to time travel would render any deadline ineffective (may be justifiable, depending on the temporal mechanics of a story).
Everywhen - To exist throughout all time, (the temporal equivalent of "everywhere").
Nowhen - To not exist in time, at all (the temporal equivalent of "nowhere").
Precedent - An instance of something, or someone, from an earlier time; past version; antecedent; precursor.
Subsequent - An instance of something, or someone, from an earlier time; future version; consequent; resultant.
Somewhen - At some unknown or unspecific time (the temporal equivalent of "somewhere").
Whenabouts - The time someone, or something, is generally occupying (the temporal equivalent of "whereabouts").

Alternative Title(s): Time Travel Tales

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10 Ideas for a Time Travel Story

Here are 10 quick ideas for a time travel story, including everything from colonies in the distant past and future, to time traveling Jews, Jesus, and jealous husbands.

If one of these ideas inspires you to create a time travel story of your own, let us know and we’ll share it with out community!

1. Future War

A future dictator invades the past. He sends giant war machines into 19th Century London, Paris and Washington, and he demands that all world leaders surrender to him. It’s up to a team of time traveling heroes to stop him.

2. As Time Goes By

A scientist discovers that he can slow down time in a localized area. He can use this to visit the future (and stop off anywhere along the way), but he can never go back. At first, he uses the device to prolong his own life, spending a day inside the time-bubble as a month passes outside. Later, curiosity compels him to travel into the distant future in search of new wonders and a fresh start.

Our protagonist finds a future world full of wonders, and he begins to build a new life for himself. But when things start to go wrong, he finds himself traveling forward yet again. Eventually, the urge to travel forward becomes irresistible as he searches for perfection. Is he really searching for something, or just running from his own past?

As our traveler comes to the end of his life he realizes that, while he has seen more than most people, he hasn’t really lived at all. He’s spent his whole life running.

3. Doing Time

Using a time machine, a penal colony is established in Earths distant future – a future in which humanity is extinct and the sun is approaching the end of its natural life-cycle. When the end finally comes, do the guards evacuate the prisoners or leave them to their fate?

4. The Man You Used To Be

After his wife leaves him, a scientist travels back in time to be with her again. He’s determined to get it right the second time around, and thinks he knows what to do to keep her happy. But when he travels into the past he comes across an obstacle he hadn’t counted on – the past version of himself.

SEE ALSO: Travelling in time but NOT space

Desperate to be with his wife again, he plots to do the unthinkable – he plans to murder his past self and take his place.

There are two obvious ways in which this story could end, each equally as ironic. 1) He kills his former self and is happily reunited with his wife, but after spending one perfect day together the time paradox begins to kick in and he vanishes into oblivion. 2) He kills his former self, but his wife recognizes that he is not the man he used to be. Because of what he’s been through and what he’s done, he’s changed, and his wife can see it in his eyes. She leaves him again.

5. Future Tense

Fearing the extinction of humanity is on the horizon, a large group of humans travel into Earths distant future to avoid the catastrophe. They arrive in a time in which the Earth has recovered from the disaster, and in which all traces of human civilization have disappeared. Many animal species have evolved beyond recognition. In this new wilderness, they attempt to build a home.

Knowing that the end of human civilization is near, people are desperate to travel to the future colony. With a limited number of places available, people fight for the last remaining passes. Eventually, the future colony finds itself with too many mouths to feed.

6. Past Participants

With the destruction of Earth imminent, humanity begins colonizing the distant past. The colonization effort slowly begins to interfere with the timeline. Each group of colonists that arrives from the future has experienced a different version of history, with increasingly interesting results.

One group of time travel colonists is from a fascist timeline in which the Nazis won the Second World War, and they try to take over the colony. Another group reports having found the remains of the colony during a future archaeological dig, indicating that the colonization effort will eventually fail.

7. Populating Zion

A team of scientists rescue Jews from Nazi extermination camps by transporting them forward in time just before the moment of their deaths. Nazis are confounded when they open the doors to gas chambers and find that their victims have mysteriously vanished. In the future, thousands of rescued Jews struggle to understand what has happened to them, and they begin to hail the lead scientist as their Messiah.

8. Time Me Up, Time Me Down

After inventing a time machine, a scientist travels into his own future where he meets his beautiful future wife. Back in his own time, he meets his future wife for the first time (for her at least), but she isn’t interested in him. He tries his hardest to impress her but fails. How can this be when they are meant to be together?

Determined to win her heart, he travels back to their first meeting over and over again, trying something different each time. He even visits her past in an attempt to learn more about her, but nothing works. Becoming increasingly obsessed, he eventually resorts to kidnapping her. He takes her forward in time to show her their future life, but his actions have drastically changed the timeline.

9. Final Interview

A time travel agency sends a man to interview famous historic figures just hours before they die. The interviews are not only important to historians, they have also become a form of popular entertainment. After interviewing countless historic figures over a long and distinguished career, our protagonist has become something of a celebrity himself. One day, a younger man arrives at his home insisting that he be allowed to interview the protagonist. The protagonist realizes that the younger man is his future replacement, and that he himself is soon to die.

(Thanks to Jorgen Lundman for this idea, the full version of which can be read here )

10. Jesus vs The Time Police

The technology needed for time travel exists, but it has been outlawed by most of the world’s governments. A special police unit or federal agency uses specialist equipment to track down illegal time travelers and prevent them from damaging the timeline.

Some of the time travelers are attempting to alter their own past for personal gain, others are rich tourists seeking a thrilling but illegal encounter with the past. One day, however, they track down a time traveler who has managed to evade them for several years. He has been living in the past for all this time, and he claims to have become an important historical figure. Doing a little research, they determine his claims to be true. The time traveler has had a profound effect on the timeline, and undoing his actions might have profoundly negative consequences. He has written himself into history – a history that the time-police have always accepted to be true.

The illegal time traveler might be a famous general, monarch, or president. He might even be a religious figure, such as Jesus (as such, he may not have had an entirely positive effect on history, but a profound one nonetheless). If the illegal time-traveler is Jesus, might his ascension to heaven actually be his forced return to his own time, staged by the time-police?The time-police are faced with a dilemma – set the timeline straight and undo his actions without knowing what the result might be, or allow him to continue living in the past.

This article was written by Mark Ball . With thanks to Jorgen Lundman.

Use our Random Story Idea Generator for inspiration for more stories.

Summaries, Analysis & Lists

Time Travel Short Stories: Examples Online

The short stories on this page all contain some form of time travel, including time loops. Some of them contain time machines or other technologies that makes the trip possible; in other stories the jump in time doesn’t have an obvious explanation. They don’t all involve obvious trips to the past or future. Sometimes, the story simply contains an element that is out of place in time. See also:

Short Stories About Time Travel

“caveat time traveler” by gregory benford.

The narrator spots the man from the past immediately. The visitor identifies himself. He’s surprised to find he’s not the first visitor from the past. He wants to take something back to prove he made it.

“Caveat Time Travel” can be read in the preview of The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF.

“Absolutely Inflexible” by Robert Silverberg

A time traveler in a spacesuit sits in Mahler’s office. He’s informed that he’ll be sent to the Moon, where all visitors from the past have to go. The man tries to get out of it, but Mahler explains why no exceptions are possible.

“Absolutely Inflexible” can be read in the preview of Time and Time Again : Sixteen Trips in Time.

“Yesterday Was Monday” by Theodore Sturgeon

When Harry Wright wakes up on Wednesday morning he realizes that yesterday was Monday. Somehow there is a gap. He notices that his environment doesn’t quite seem complete.

“Yesterday Was Monday” can be read in the preview of The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century.

“Death Ship” by Richard Matheson

The crew of a spaceship is collecting samples from various planets to determine their suitability for human habitation. While nearing a new planet, Mason spots a metallic flash. The crew speculates that it might be a ship. Captain Ross orders a landing to check it out.

“Death Ship” can be read in the preview of The Time Traveler’s Almanac.

“The Third Level” by Jack Finney

The narrator has been to the third level of Grand Central Station, even though everyone else believes there are only two. He’s just an ordinary guy and doesn’t know why he discovered this unknown level. He relates how it happened.

“The Third Level” can be read in the preview of About Time: 12 Short Stories.

“A Touch of Petulance” by Ray Bradbury

Jonathan Hughes met his fate in the form of an old man while he rode the train home from work. He noticed the old man’s newspaper looked more modern than his own. There was a story on the front page about a murdered woman—his wife. His mind raced.

This story can be read in the preview of Killer, Come Back To Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury.

“Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving

Rip Van Winkle is lazy at home but helpful to, and well-liked by, his neighbors. He’s out in the mountains one day to get away from things. With night approaching, he starts for home but meets up with a group of men. He has something to drink and goes to sleep, which changes everything.

This story can be read in the preview of The Big Book of Classic Fantasy .

“Twilight” by John W. Campbell

Jim picks up a hitch-hiker, Ares, who says he’s a scientist from the year 3059. He says he traveled millions of years into the future, but came back to the wrong year. Life in 3059 is trouble free, with machines taking care of everything. Future Earth is in trouble, with all life extinct, except for humans and plants.

This is the second story in the preview of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Vol 1 . (49% into preview)

“The Man Who Walked Home” by James Tiptree, Jr.

An accident at the Bonneville Particle Acceleration Facility decimated the Earth’s population and severely damaged the biosphere and surface. Decades later, a huge flat creature emerges from the crater at the explosion site and promptly disappeared. There are other sightings in the years that follow.

This story can be read in the preview of the anthology Timegates . (18% into preview)

“An Assassin in Time” by S. A. Asthana

Navy Seal Jessica Kravitz recovers from the effects of the time jump. She’s done it before, but there are always side-effects. She’s on a highly classified, very important, and expensive mission. Previous jumps have familiarized her with the grounds. This time, she should be able to reach her target.

This story can be read in the preview of AT THE EDGES: Short Science Fiction, Thriller and Horror Stories . (17% in)

“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang

Fuwaad, a fabric merchant, appears before the Caliph to recount a remarkable story. While looking for a gift, he entered a large shop with a new owner. It had a marvelous assortment of offerings, all made by the owner or under his direction. Fuwaad is led into the back where he’s shown a small hoop that manipulates time. He also has a larger gateway that people can walk through. The owner tells Fuwaad the stories of a few who did just that.

This story is on the longer side but doesn’t feel like it. Most of “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” can be read in the Amazon preview of Exhalation: Stories .

“Time Locker” by Harry Kuttner

Gallegher is a scientist—drunken, erratic and brilliant. He invents things but pays them little attention after. His acquaintance Vanning, an unscrupulous lawyer, has made use of some of these inventions, including a neuro-gun that he rents out. During a visit he sees a locker that is bigger inside than out. Fascinated with the item’s possibilities, he offers to purchase it.

Some of “Time Locker” can be read in the preview of The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century.

Time Travel Short Stories, Cont’d

“All You Zombies” by Robert A. Heinlein

A young man explains to a bartender that he was born a girl. He (she) gave birth to a child and there were complications. The doctors noticed he (she) was a hermaphrodite and performed an emergency sex-change operation.

A lot of this story can be read in the preview of “ All You Zombies—”: Five Classic Stories .

“The Hundred-Light-Year Diary” by Greg Egan

The narrator meets his future wife, Alison, for lunch exactly when he knew he would. His diary told him. Everyone alive is allotted a hundred words a day to send back to themselves.

Most of this story can be read in the preview of Axiomatic . (Select Kindle first then Preview, 57% in)

“The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov

Arnold Potterley, a Professor of Ancient History, wants to use the chronoscope—the ability to view a scene from the past—for his research on Carthage. The government maintains strict control over its use, and his request is denied. Frustrated, Potterley embarks on a plan to get around this restriction, which is professionally risky.

Some of this story can be read in the preview of The Complete Stories, Vol 1 . (6% in)

“Signal Moon” by Kate Quinn

Working with the Royal Naval Service, Lily Baines intercepts radio communications to enemy vessels for decoding. One night, everything changes when she picks up an impossible message—a plea for help from another time.

Preview of “Signal Moon”

“Journey to the Seed” by Alejo Carpentier

An old man wanders around a demolition site, muttering a string of incomprehensible phrases. The roof has been removed and, by evening, most of the house is down. When the site is deserted, the old man waves his walking stick over a pile of discarded tiles. They fly back and cover the floor. The house continues to rebuild. Inside, Don Marcial lies on his deathbed.

“A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury

In the future, a company offers guided hunting safaris into the past to kill dinosaurs. Extreme care is taken to ensure nothing happens that could alter the present.

Read “A Sound of Thunder” (PDF Pg. 3)

“That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French” by Stephen King

Carol and Bill, married twenty-five years, are on their second honeymoon, driving to their destination. Carol experiences déjà vu; voices and images keep coming to her mind. Their drive comes to an end and she finds herself at an earlier point in their trip.

“The Clock That Went Backward” by Edward Page Mitchell

The narrator recounts the discovery surrounding a clock left to his cousin Harry by his Aunt Gertrude. As young boys they witnessed a strange event. Late one night Aunt Gertrude wound the clock, put her face to the dial, and then kissed and caressed it. The hands were moving backward. She fell to the floor when it stopped.

Read “The Clock That Went Backward”

“Soldier (Soldier from Tomorrow)” by Harlan Ellison

Qarlo, a soldier, is fighting in the Great War VII. He doesn’t expect to be able to go back. The odds are against it. Qarlo anticipates the Regimenter’s order and gets warped off the battlefield. He’s not sure where he is but his instincts kick in.

“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester

Henry Hassel comes home to find his wife in the arms of another man. He could get his revenge immediately but he has a more intellectual plan. He gets a revolver and builds a time machine. He goes into the past.

“Cosmic Corkscrew” by Michael A. Burstein

The narrator is sent back to 1938 to make a copy of a rejected story by an unnamed writer. Unknown to Dr. Scheihagen, the narrator adjusts his arrival to three days earlier. He wants to make contact with the writer.

“Time’s Arrow” by Arthur C. Clarke

Barton and Davis, geologists, are assisting Professor Fowler with an excavation. The professor receives an invitation to visit a nearby research facility. Barton and Davis are curious to know what goes on there. The professor says he will fill them in, but after his visit he says he’s been asked not to talk about it. Henderson, from the research facility, returns the visit. Something he says starts the geologists speculating about a device that could see into the past.

“The Final Days” by David Langford

Harman and Ferris, presidential candidates, are participating in a televised debate. Ferris is struggling to connect with the audience while Harman relishes the attention. The technician signals Harman that there are fourteen watchers. His confidence increases.

Read “The Final Days”

“Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim

When Hwang is in a time he likes he tries to stay awake. Hwang jumps ahead in time when he sleeps. It could only be a few days; it could be years.

Read “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters”

“Fish Night” by Joe R. Lansdale

Two traveling salesmen, a father and son, get broke down on a desert road. They sit by the car and talk about how hard it is to make a living. The father tells his son about an unusual experience he had on the same road years ago.

Read “Fish Night”

“The Fox and the Forest” by Ray Bradbury

William and Susan Travis have gone to Mexico in 1938. They’re enjoying a local celebration. William assures Susan that they’re safe—they have traveler’s checks to last a lifetime, and he’s confident they won’t be found. Susan notices a conspicuous man in a café looking at them. She thinks he could be a Searcher, but William says he’s nobody.

“A Statue for Father” by Isaac Asimov

The narrator tells the story of his father, a theoretical physicist who researched time travel. He’s celebrated now, but it was a difficult climb. When time travel research fell out of favor, the dean forced him out. He continued the research independently with his son. Eventually, they succeed in holding a window open long enough for the son to reach in. He brings back some dinosaur eggs.

“The Pendulum” by Ray Bradbury

Layeville has been swinging in a massive glass pendulum for a long time. The people call him The Prisoner of Time. It’s his punishment for his crime. He had constructed a time machine and invited thirty of the world’s preeminent scientists to attend the unveiling.

Read The Pendulum

“Who’s Cribbing?” by Jack Lewis

A writer has his manuscript returned by a publisher. The story he submitted was published years before—he obviously plagiarized it. They warn him against doing this again. The writer has never heard of the author who first wrote the story and claims it’s an original work.

“Who’s Cribbing” is in Time Machines: The Best Time Travel Stories Ever Written.

I’ll keep adding short stories about time travel and time machines as I find more.

photo of Icon of the Seas, taken on a long railed path approaching the stern of the ship, with people walking along dock

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

selfie photo of man with glasses, in background is swim-up bar with two women facing away

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

photo of elaborate twisting multicolored waterslides with long stairwell to platform

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

2 photos: a ship's foamy white wake stretches to the horizon; a man at reailing with water and two large ships docked behind

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

2 photos: 2 slices of pizza on plate; man in "Daddy's Little Meatball" shirt and shorts standing in outdoor dining area with ship's exhaust stacks in background

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

photo of sheltered sandy beach with palms, umbrellas, and chairs with two large docked cruise ships in background

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

photo from inside of spacious geodesic-style glass dome facing ocean, with stairwells and seating areas

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

photo of author smiling and holding soft-serve ice-cream cone with outdoor seating area in background

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Money latest: The age when the average Briton pays off their mortgage revealed

The average Briton is 61 when they pay off their mortgage - a drop of two years. Meanwhile, Spotify is raising prices again. Read about this and the rest of today's consumer and personal finance news in the Money blog, and leave a comment in the form below.

Thursday 11 April 2024 22:26, UK

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Spotify to hike subscription price by up to £24 a year
Minimum income for family visa rises by £10,000
Italy mourns 'end of Italian waiters in London' as visa rule brought in
Wendy's creating 400 jobs as part of UK expansion
The age when the average Briton pays off their mortgage
'WTF is going on with the price of olive oil?'
Could I build a home gym for less than my gym membership?
Basically... Tax codes
Cheap Eats : Great British Menu legend shares ultimate toastie recipe

Ask a question or make a comment

Fake flights and caravans are the two most common items being sold by fraudsters in relation to travel, Lloyds Bank's research has found.

As Britons head online to book deals for the upcoming bank holidays and summer, they have been urged to "remain vigilant", with the average holiday scam victim being conned out of £765.

Amid rising flight costs post-COVID, people have been flocking to social media and other lesser-known websites to secure cheaper deals.

A food delivery company claims to have created an "unshakeable bag" to avoid spillage in transit.

Bolt, which owns the Bolt Food delivery platform, said its design is based on gyroscope technology and will keep food stable "during the most abrupt movements".

In a post to its website, the firm said it would make the design available to its competitors as it is "too powerful to be owned by any one company".

"We believe everyone should enjoy a perfect meal, regardless of which app they order it from," it said.

Assaulting a shopworker is to be made a separate criminal offence after a government U-turn following pressure from campaigners.

The government previously said "more legislative change" was not needed to tackle the "intolerable violence and abuse" faced by shopworkers, arguing it did not think it was "required or will be most effective".

But Rishi Sunak is now set to announce his government will be amending the Criminal Justice Bill to bring in the new offence.

The drugmaker was on its knees when Sir Pascal Soriot took over in 2012.

But under his leadership it now does just about everything the UK wants from a business - creating high value-added jobs and developing products that improve people's lives.

The FTSE 100's performance has lagged that of many of its peers, both in the United States and Europe, more or less since the Brexit vote in 2016.

That poor performance has reflected the poor valuation of many UK-listed companies - resulting in numerous foreign takeovers of UK businesses in recent months and years.

It has also led to a scarcity in the number of companies floating on the London Stock Exchange, most notably the Cambridge-based chip designer ARM Holdings , which last year opted to list in the US instead.

The situation has alarmed the government, which has announced a number of reforms aimed at raising the UK's attractiveness .

An imminent shareholder vote on Sir Pascal's pay makes a particularly interesting test case because few would dispute that he has been the most outstanding FTSE 100 chief executive of his generation.

This rise could take his potential earnings to £18.5m this year - which critics say is excessive.

Read my full piece here ...

England's average house price has risen by £103,000 over the last decade, while the average annual wage has risen by £7,734.

But some areas have seen homeownership affordability decline more than others...

The London borough of Barking and Dagenham has seen the most significant fall, according to moving platform Getamover.

The platform found the area has seen house prices more than double to £380,000 in the last 10 years - but wages have only risen by £2,182.

Hillingdon in West London took the second spot, with the average property shooting up by £230,000 to £495,000, while the average income increased by just £143.

While London remains the most unaffordable region, the East Midlands has also seen a notable fall.

Oadby and Wigston in Leicestershire ranked fifth in the table, with the average house price increasing by £129,000 and the median annual income growing by £2,644.

Gedling ranks sixth among the areas of England where the affordability of buying a home has declined most.

The Nottinghamshire region has seen house prices soar by 84.8% to £231,000, while the average income has risen by just 13.11% to £33,454.

You can see how other areas fared in the table below...

Rishi Sunak's post-Brexit rules for foreign workers are getting tough press in Italy this week - with claims they could mark the end of Italian waiters in London.

April saw the minimum salary requirement for a skilled worker visa increase from £26,200 to £38,700 - a near 50% rise as the government tries to reduce immigration.

Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica published an article on its site headlined "Italians in London, the long goodbye" after the new rule was brought in this month.

There were an estimated 342,000 Italians living in the UK in 2021, according to the latest Office for National Statistics census data.

La Repubblica said the new rule change would lead to the "end of the story" of Italy's "ancient roots" in the capital, which was founded by the Romans in 43 AD.

Separately, Italian journalist Antonio Polito wrote in the Corriere della Sera newspaper that the new salary for skilled workers was "an amount that no young novice can realistically earn".

"Thus London gives up one of its great assets, the fact of being an offshore and cosmopolitan city," he said.

Mr Sunak's post-Brexit rule change has worried hospitality bosses who are still struggling to get to grips with a post-COVID reality and rising costs.

Conor Sheridan, founder of Nory and Mad Egg restaurant chain, previously told the Money blog that roughly 14% of his 15,000 UK employee base were on working visas that could be affected.

Trade body UKHospitality also said the changes would "further shrink the talent pool that the entire economy will be recruiting from".

As the migration law came in, Home Secretary James Cleverly said it was "time to turn off the taps and end the flow of cheap workers from abroad".

"We are refocusing our immigration system to prioritise the brightest and best who have the skills our economy needs, while reducing overall numbers," he said.

Several of the UK's biggest supermarkets closed their gender pay gap in the last year - while Morrisons saw the biggest rise, figures show.

Ocado and Lidl reduced their gap by the largest amounts in 2023-24 compared to the previous year, while Tesco, Asda, Aldi, Co-op, Iceland and Waitrose owner John Lewis also saw a reduction.

The data comes from the government's gender pay gap service and states the difference in hourly rates of pay.

In contrast to other big-name brands, Morrisons saw its mean pay gap widen to 12.5% from 7.6%. M&S also saw a slight increase from 12.5% to 12.6%.

The mean figure gives the best overall view of the gender pay gap but includes extreme values which could skew the average.

Of the 11 biggest UK supermarkets, Co-op has the largest pay gap with 13.2%, followed by M&S and Morrisons.

An M&S spokesperson said: "We're committed to driving equal opportunities and making M&S a great place to work for women. Encouragingly our median pay gap has decreased, and women now make up more than 50% of our UK store management population, but we know there is more to do.

"We're making progress with the launch of new initiatives, talent programmes, and policies, including our flexible working offer – Worklife, a Job Share Finder, and our industry-leading family leave offer."

A spokesperson for Co-op said: "We are committed to treating our colleague member owners fairly, and this includes driving equitable outcomes for female colleagues. We've seen a significant reduction in our gender pay gap since we started to report data in 2017, and this year's data shows further progress towards closing it.

"It's important to reiterate that we don't pay people differently based on their gender at Co-op. The gender pay gap is caused by us having fewer females in leadership role, where salaries are higher.

"Our focus on improving representation remains, as we know this is one of the key drivers causing the gender pay gap. Today, 40% of our leadership population are female - this is not enough, which is why we’ve launched a series of development programmes and have a coaching and mentoring offer to support women with career progression.

"We know there’s still much to do in this space and will hold ourselves to account and continue to strive for gender equality."

Morrisons has also been contacted for comment.

Every Thursday we look at a different savings option, explain the pros and cons, and reveal the best deals on the market (see table below for that). This week we're talking about the best notice accounts. Savings Champion founder Anna Bowes says this...

As with the rest of the savings market, the top notice account rates have started to fall. However, there are stalwarts like the Investec 90-day notice account that are holding steady and as a result offering savers an opportunity to earn a little more, while not having to tie up their cash for too long.

A relatively unused aspect of the savings market, notice accounts offer a bit of a halfway house, with the best rates available generally paying more than the top easy access rates, but will more flexibility of access than a fixed term bond.

Just as it sounds, these savings accounts require you to give notice in order to access your money without a penalty. The usual notice period ranges from 30 to 120 days, although there are some accounts on the market that require six months or even a year's notice.

By Sarah Taaffe-Maguire , business reporter

Another record month for Heathrow. Last month was the busiest ever March for the UK's biggest airport, the second record-breaking month in a row.

It was also the busiest Easter weekend as Good Friday became the busiest ever direct departure day, when 118,000 people began their journey at the airport.

It shows, despite cost of living pressures, lots of Britons were going on holiday.

More good news for Heathrow came earlier this week as planned strike action by 600 border force officers was called off to allow for negotiations in its dispute over working patterns.

Oil prices are still high, hanging around $90. A barrel of Brent crude oil, the benchmark for oil prices, costs $90.66. The last time prices were this high was in the wake of the 7 October attacks and fears of conflict spreading throughout the Middle East.

On the currency front, £1 buys $1.2538 and €1.1678.

How old is the average Briton when they buy their first home, or finish paying their mortgage, or retire?

These are some of the questions answered in a "Journeying Through Life" data dump from the Office for National Statistics.

Here are some of the key takeaways...

Home ownership - including the one life event that's happening earlier

People are buying homes later in life, perhaps unsurprisingly given how house prices have risen in the last decade or so.

In 2022, more than half of people owned their own home (either with a mortgage or outright) by the age of 36.

That's a significant increase on 2004's figures - which showed the average age for home ownership was 32.

This graph shows what proportion of people own homes at what age.

It isn't all doom and gloom on the homes front, however, with the age at which people own their home outright (ie mortgage paid off) dropping from 63 (in 2004) to 61 in 2020.

This is pretty much the only life event happening earlier, however.

Retiring later

Again, this probably won't come as a huge surprise, but people are retiring later.

The age where more than half of people were retired increased from 64 in 2011 to 66 in 2021. 

There has been a bigger increase in average retirement age for women (from 61 years in 2011, to 66 years in 2021) than for men (from 65 in 2011 to 66 in 2021).

The ONS says this is because the state pension age for women was increased from 60 to 66 during this time to match men.

Gender pay gap shrinking but still present

The latest data shows that men are still, on the whole, being paid more than women - although the gender pay gap is shown to be shrinking.

For all employees, the gender pay gap was 14% in 2023 - compared with 20% in 2013.

Despite the gap shrinking, this graph shows that men's hourly wages are higher than women's at nearly all ages.

The grey shaded area represents the pay gap.

Another part of the data shows that males start work a touch earlier than women - with half of males in full-time employment by the age of 23 (compared with females at 24) in 2021.

That data could be explained by the fact that more women attend university - some 319,000 females compared with 285,000 males in 2022.

Moving out, marrying and having children

The age at which young people move out of their family homes is increasing, too.

In 2011, half of people were not living with their parents at the age of 21 - compared with 24 in 2022.

More men live with their parents than women, with 61% of adults living at home in 2021 were male.

When it comes to having children, the average age at which women have their first baby has risen to 29.

That's up from an average of just 23 in 1970.

And finally, marriage.

The median age at first marriage has been steadily increasing since the 1960s.

For opposite sex couples married in 2020, the median age was 32 years for men and 30 years for women. For those entering into same-sex marriage, the median age was older, at 36 years for men and 32 years for women.

As well as getting married older, fewer people are getting married. In 2019, marriage rates had fallen to their lowest on record. For men, there were 18.6 marriages per 1,000 never-married men; for women, there were 17.2 marriages per 1,000 never-married women.

Spotify has announced it is hiking its subscription prices by up to £24 a year.

It is the second time in less than a year that the music streaming giant has increased its prices.

Here's how the prices will change...

Individual: £11.99 a month (up from £10.99 a month)

Duo: £16.99 a month (up from £14.99 a month)

Family: £19.99 a month (up from £17.99 a month)

When will the change kick in?

The subscription price will change from May and if you are an existing customer Spotify will email you and give you one-month's notice of the change.

If you are on a free trial you will pay the old price for one month once your trial ends.

A Spotify spokesperson told Sky News: "So that we can keep innovating and delivering value to fans, the music industry, and creators on our platform, we occasionally update our prices.

"We've begun communicating with existing subscribers in the UK to explain what this means for their account."

American burger chain Wendy's will be recruiting for over 400 job roles as part of its expansion across the UK.

The chain returned to the UK in 2021 after a 20-year break and has since opened just over 30 sites, including drive-throughs in Colchester, Peterborough, Derby and Brampton Hut.

But the chain, which was founded in Columbus, Ohio, in 1969, plans to open a further nine sites this year in Liverpool, Middlesbrough, and a second location in Sheffield.

New locations will include Liverpool, Middlesbrough and a second site in Sheffield.

Wendy's franchisee GH Burgers will open a first restaurant in Wood Green, London, this year.

There will also be restaurants in Southend-on-Sea, Colchester, Cambridge and Newcastle.

Michael Clarke, UK managing director for the Wendy's Company, told The Caterer : "We've seen great momentum in building Wendy's fandom in the UK, and the love and excitement for this iconic brand grows stronger with each new restaurant opening."

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25 Questions (and Answers!) About the Great North American Eclipse

The McDonald Observatory’s guide to one of nature’s most beautiful and astounding events: What you might see, how to view it safely, how astronomers will study it, how animals might react, and some of the mythology and superstitions about the Sun’s great disappearing act.

1. What’s happening?

The Moon will cross directly between Earth and the Sun, temporarily blocking the Sun from view along a narrow path across Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Viewers across the rest of the United States will see a partial eclipse, with the Moon covering only part of the Sun’s disk.

2. When will it happen?

The eclipse takes place on April 8. It will get underway at 10:42 a.m. CDT, when the Moon’s shadow first touches Earth’s surface, creating a partial eclipse. The Big Show—totality—begins at about 11:39 a.m., over the south-central Pacific Ocean. The shadow will first touch North America an hour and a half later, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Moving at more than 1,600 miles (2,575 km) per hour, the path of totality will enter the United States at Eagle Pass, Texas, at 1:27 p.m. CDT. The lunar shadow will exit the United States and enter the Canadian province of New Brunswick near Houlton, Maine, at 2:35 p.m. (3:35 p.m. EDT).

3. How long will totality last?

The exact timing depends on your location. The maximum length is 4 minutes, 27 seconds near Torreon, Mexico. In the United States, several towns in southwestern Texas will see 4 minutes, 24 seconds of totality. The closer a location is to the centerline of the path of totality, the longer the eclipse will last.

4. What will it look like?

Eclipse veterans say there’s nothing quite like a total solar eclipse. In the last moments before the Sun disappears behind the Moon, bits of sunlight filter through the lunar mountains and canyons, forming bright points of light known as Baily’s beads. The last of the beads provides a brief blaze known as a diamond ring effect. When it fades away, the sky turns dark and the corona comes into view— million-degree plasma expelled from the Sun’s surface. It forms silvery filaments that radiate away from the Sun. Solar prominences, which are fountains of gas from the surface, form smaller, redder streamers on the rim of the Sun’s disk.

5. What safety precautions do I need to take?

It’s perfectly safe to look at the total phase of the eclipse with your eyes alone. In fact, experts say it’s the best way to enjoy the spectacle. The corona, which surrounds the intervening Moon with silvery tendrils of light, is only about as bright as a full Moon.

During the partial phases of the eclipse, however, including the final moments before and first moments after totality, your eyes need protection from the Sun’s blinding light. Even a 99-percent-eclipsed Sun is thousands of times brighter than a full Moon, so even a tiny sliver of direct sunlight can be dangerous!

To stay safe, use commercially available eclipse viewers, which can look like eyeglasses or can be embedded in a flat sheet that you hold in front of your face. Make sure your viewer meets the proper safety standards, and inspect it before you use it to make sure there are no scratches to let in unfiltered sunlight.

You also can view the eclipse through a piece of welder’s glass (No. 14 or darker), or stand under a leafy tree and look at the ground; the gaps between leaves act as lenses, projecting a view of the eclipse on the ground. With an especially leafy tree you can see hundreds of images of the eclipse at once. (You can also use a colander or similar piece of gear to create the same effect.)

One final mode of eclipse watching is with a pinhole camera. You can make one by poking a small hole in an index card, file folder, or piece of stiff cardboard. Let the Sun shine through the hole onto the ground or a piece of paper, but don’t look at the Sun through the hole! The hole projects an image of the eclipsed Sun, allowing you to follow the entire sequence, from the moment of first contact through the Moon’s disappearance hours later.

6. Where can I see the eclipse?

In the United States, the path of totality will extend from Eagle Pass, Texas, to Houlton, Maine. It will cross 15 states: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Tennessee, and Michigan (although it barely nicks the last two).

In Texas, the eclipse will darken the sky over Austin, Waco, and Dallas—the most populous city in the path, where totality (the period when the Sun is totally eclipsed) will last 3 minutes, 51 seconds.

Other large cities along the path include Little Rock; Indianapolis; Dayton, Toledo, and Cleveland, Ohio; Erie, Pennsylvania; Buffalo and Rochester, New York; and Burlington, Vermont.

Outside the path of totality, American skywatchers will see a partial eclipse, in which the Sun covers only part of the Sun’s disk. The sky will grow dusky and the air will get cooler, but the partially eclipsed Sun is still too bright to look at without proper eye protection. The closer to the path of totality, the greater the extent of the eclipse. From Memphis and Nashville, for example, the Moon will cover more than 95 percent of the Sun’s disk. From Denver and Phoenix, it’s about 65 percent. And for the unlucky skywatchers in Seattle, far to the northwest of the eclipse centerline, it’s a meager 20 percent.

The total eclipse path also crosses Mexico, from the Pacific coast, at Mazatlán, to the Texas border. It also crosses a small portion of Canada, barely including Hamilton, Ontario. Eclipse Details for Locations Around the United States • aa.usno.navy.mil/data/Eclipse2024 • eclipse.aas.org • GreatAmericanEclipse.com

7. What causes solar eclipses?

These awe-inspiring spectacles are the result of a pleasant celestial coincidence: The Sun and Moon appear almost exactly the same size in Earth’s sky. The Sun is actually about 400 times wider than the Moon but it’s also about 400 times farther, so when the new Moon passes directly between Earth and the Sun—an alignment known as syzygy—it can cover the Sun’s disk, blocking it from view.

8. Why don’t we see an eclipse at every new Moon?

The Moon’s orbit around Earth is tilted a bit with respect to the Sun’s path across the sky, known as the ecliptic. Because of that angle, the Moon passes north or south of the Sun most months, so there’s no eclipse. When the geometry is just right, however, the Moon casts its shadow on Earth’s surface, creating a solar eclipse. Not all eclipses are total. The Moon’s distance from Earth varies a bit, as does Earth’s distance from the Sun. If the Moon passes directly between Earth and the Sun when the Moon is at its farthest, we see an annular eclipse, in which a ring of sunlight encircles the Moon. Regardless of the distance, if the SunMoon-Earth alignment is off by a small amount, the Moon can cover only a portion of the Sun’s disk, creating a partial eclipse.

9. How often do solar eclipses happen?

Earth sees as least two solar eclipses per year, and, rarely, as many as five. Only three eclipses per two years are total. In addition, total eclipses are visible only along narrow paths. According to Belgian astronomer Jean Meuss, who specializes in calculating such things, any given place on Earth will see a total solar eclipse, on average, once every 375 years. That number is averaged over many centuries, so the exact gap varies. It might be centuries between succeeding eclipses, or it might be only a few years. A small region of Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky, close to the southeast of St. Louis, for example, saw the total eclipse of 2017 and will experience this year’s eclipse as well. Overall, though, you don’t want to wait for a total eclipse to come to you. If you have a chance to travel to an eclipse path, take it!

10. What is the limit for the length of totality?

Astronomers have calculated the length of totality for eclipses thousands of years into the future. Their calculations show that the greatest extent of totality will come during the eclipse of July 16, 2186, at 7 minutes, 29 seconds, in the Atlantic Ocean, near the coast of South America. The eclipse will occur when the Moon is near its closest point to Earth, so it appears largest in the sky, and Earth is near its farthest point from the Sun, so the Sun appears smaller than average. That eclipse, by the way, belongs to the same Saros cycle as this year’s.

11. When will the next total eclipse be seen from the United States?

The next total eclipse visible from anywhere in the United States will take place on March 30, 2033, across Alaska. On August 22, 2044, a total eclipse will be visible across parts of Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. The next eclipse to cross the entire country will take place on August 12, 2045, streaking from northern California to southern Florida. Here are the other total solar eclipses visible from the contiguous U.S. this century:

March 30, 2052 Florida, Georgia, tip of South Carolina May 11, 2078 From Louisiana to North Carolina May 1, 2079 From Philadelphia up the Atlantic coast to Maine September 14, 2099 From North Dakota to the Virginia-North Carolina border

12. What is the origin of the word ‘eclipse?’

The word first appeared in English writings in the late 13th century. It traces its roots, however, to the Greek words “ecleipsis” or “ekleipein.” According to various sources, the meaning was “to leave out, fail to appear,” “a failing, forsaking,” or “abandon, cease, die.”

13. Do solar eclipses follow any kind of pattern?

The Moon goes through several cycles. The best known is its 29.5-day cycle of phases, from new through full and back again. Other cycles include its distance from Earth (which varies by about 30,000 miles (50,000 km) over 27.5 days) and its relationship to the Sun’s path across the sky, known as the ecliptic (27.2 days), among others. These three cycles overlap every 6,585.3 days, which is 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours.

This cycle of cycles is known as a Saros (a word created by Babylonians). The circumstances for each succeeding eclipse in a Saros are similar—the Moon is about the same distance from Earth, for example, and they occur at the same time of year. Each eclipse occurs one-third of the way around Earth from the previous one, however; the next eclipse in this Saros, for example, will be visible from parts of the Pacific Ocean.

Each Saros begins with a partial eclipse. A portion of the Moon just nips the northern edge of the Sun, for example, blocking only a fraction of the Sun’s light. With each succeeding eclipse in the cycle, the Moon covers a larger fraction of the solar disk, eventually creating dozens of total eclipses. The Moon then slides out of alignment again, this time in the opposite direction, creating more partial eclipses. The series ends with a grazing partial eclipse on the opposite hemisphere (the southern tip, for example).

Several Saros cycles churn along simultaneously (40 are active now), so Earth doesn’t have to wait 18 years between eclipses. They can occur at intervals of one, five, six, or seven months.

The April 8 eclipse is the 30th of Saros 139, a series of 71 events that began with a partial eclipse, in the far north, and will end with another partial eclipse, this time in the far southern hemisphere. The next eclipse in this Saros, also total, will take place on April 20, 2042.

First eclipse May 17, 1501

First total eclipse December 21, 1843

Final total eclipse March 26, 2601

Longest total eclipse July 16, 2186, 7 minutes, 29 seconds

Final partial eclipse July 3, 2763

All eclipses 71 (43 total, 16 partial, 12 hybrid)

Source: NASA Catalog of Solar Eclipses: eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEsaros/SEsaros139.html

14. What about eclipse seasons?

Eclipses occur in “seasons,” with two or three eclipses (lunar and solar) in a period of about five weeks. Individual eclipses are separated by two weeks: a lunar eclipse at full Moon, a solar eclipse at new Moon (the sequence can occur in either order). If the first eclipse in a season occurs during the first few days of the window, then the season will have three eclipses. When one eclipse in the season is poor, the other usually is much better.

That’s certainly the case with the season that includes the April 8 eclipse. It begins with a penumbral lunar eclipse on the night of March 24, in which the Moon will pass through Earth’s outer shadow. The eclipse will cover the Americas, although the shadow is so faint that most skywatchers won’t notice it.

This article was previously published in the March/April 2024 issue of StarDate magazine, a publication of The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory. Catch StarDate’s daily radio program on more than 300 stations nationwide or subscribe online at stardate.org .

15. How can astronomers forecast eclipses so accurately?

They’ve been recording eclipses and the motions of the Moon for millennia. And over the past half century they’ve been bouncing laser beams off of special reflectors carried to the Moon by Apollo astronauts and Soviet rovers. Those observations reveal the Moon’s position to within a fraction of an inch. Using a combination of the Earth-Moon distance, the Moon’s precise shape, Earth’s rotation and its distance from the Sun, and other factors, astronomers can predict the timing of an eclipse to within a fraction of a second many centuries into the future.

Edmond Halley made the first confirmed solar eclipse prediction, using the laws of gravity devised only a few decades earlier by Isaac Newton. Halley forecast that an eclipse would cross England on May 3, 1715. He missed the timing by just four minutes and the path by 20 miles, so the eclipse is known as Halley’s Eclipse.

16. What are the types of solar eclipses?

Total : the Moon completely covers the Sun.

Annular : the Moon is too far away to completely cover the Sun, leaving a bright ring of sunlight around it.

Partial : the Moon covers only part of the Sun’s disk.

Hybrid : an eclipse that is annular at its beginning and end, but total at its peak.

17. What are Baily’s beads?

During the minute or two before or after totality, bits of the Sun shine through canyons and other features on the limb of the Moon, producing “beads” of sunlight. They were first recorded and explained by Edmond Halley, in 1715. During a presentation to the Royal Academy of Sciences more than a century later, however, astronomer Frances Baily first described them as “a string of beads,” so they’ve been known as Baily’s beads ever since. Please note that Baily’s beads are too bright to look at without eye protection!

18. Will Earth always see total solar eclipses?

No, it will not. The Moon is moving away from Earth at about 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) per year. Based on that rate of recession, in about 600 million years the Moon would have moved so far from Earth that it would no longer appear large enough to cover the Sun. The speed at which the Moon separates from Earth changes over the eons, however, so scientists aren’t sure just when Earth will see its final total solar eclipse.

19. How will the eclipse affect solar power?

If your solar-powered house is in or near the path of totality, the lights truly will go out, as they do at night. For large power grids, the eclipse will temporarily reduce the total amount of electricity contributed by solar generation. During the October 14, 2023, annular eclipse, available solar power plummeted in California and Texas. At the same time, demand increased as individual Sun-powered homes and other buildings began drawing electricity from the power grid. Both networks were able to compensate with stations powered by natural gas and other sources.

The power drop during this year’s eclipse could be more dramatic because there will be less sunlight at the peak of the eclipse.

20. What are some of the myths and superstitions associated with solar eclipses?

Most ancient cultures created stories to explain the Sun’s mysterious and terrifying disappearances.

In China and elsewhere, it was thought the Sun was being devoured by a dragon. Other cultures blamed a hungry frog (Vietnam), a giant wolf loosed by the god Loki (Scandinavia), or the severed head of a monster (India). Still others saw an eclipse as a quarrel (or a reunion) between Sun and Moon. Some peoples shot flaming arrows into the sky to scare away the monster or to rekindle the solar fire. One especially intriguing story, from Transylvania, said that an eclipse occurred when the Sun covered her face in disgust at bad human behavior.

Eclipses have been seen as omens of evil deeds to come. In August 1133, King Henry I left England for Normandy one day before a lengthy solar eclipse, bringing prophesies of doom. The country later was plunged into civil war, and Henry died before he could return home, strengthening the impression that solar eclipses were bad mojo.

Ancient superstitions claimed that eclipses could cause plague and other maladies. Modern superstitions say that food prepared during an eclipse is poison and that an eclipse will damage the babies of pregnant women who look at it. None of that is true, of course. There’s nothing at all to fear from this beautiful natural event.

21. How do animals react to solar eclipses?

Scientists haven’t studied the topic very thoroughly, but they do have some general conclusions. Many daytime animals start their evening rituals, while many nighttime animals wake up when the eclipse is over, perhaps cursing their alarm clocks for letting them sleep so late!

During the 2017 total eclipse, scientists observed 17 species at Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina. About three-quarters of the species showed some response as the sky darkened. Some animals acted nervous, while others simply headed for bed. A species of gibbon had the most unusual reaction, moving excitedly and chattering in ways the zookeepers hadn’t seen before.

Other studies have reported that bats and owls sometimes come out during totality, hippos move toward their nighttime feeding grounds, and spiders tear down their webs, only to rebuild them when the Sun returns. Bees have been seen to return to their hives during totality and not budge until the next day, crickets begin their evening chorus, and, unfortunately, mosquitoes emerge, ready to dine on unsuspecting eclipse watchers.

A NASA project, Eclipse Soundscapes, is using volunteers around the country to learn more about how animals react to the changes. The project collected audio recordings and observations by participants during the annular eclipse last year, and will repeat the observations this year. Volunteers can sign up at eclipsesoundscapes.org

22. How will scientists study this year’s eclipse?

Astronomers don’t pay quite as much professional attention to solar eclipses as they did in decades and centuries past. However, they still schedule special observations to add to their knowledge of the Sun and especially the inner edge of the corona.

Sun-watching satellites create artificial eclipses by placing a small disk across the face of the Sun, blocking the Sun’s disk and revealing the corona, solar prominences, and big explosions of charged particles known as coronal mass ejections.

Because of the way light travels around the edges of an eclipsing disk, however, it’s difficult to observe the region just above the Sun’s visible surface, which is where much of the action takes place. The corona is heated to millions of degrees there, and the constant flow of particles known as the solar wind is accelerated to a million miles per hour or faster, so solar astronomers really want to see that region in detail. The eclipsing Moon doesn’t create the same effects around the limb of the Sun, so a solar eclipse still provides the best way to look close to the Sun’s surface.

For this year’s eclipse, some scientists will repeat a series of experiments they conducted in 2017 using a pair of highaltitude WB-57 aircraft to “tag team” through the lunar shadow, providing several extra minutes of observations.

Other scientists will use the eclipse to study Earth’s ionosphere, an electrically charged layer of the atmosphere that “bends” radio waves, allowing them to travel thousands of miles around the planet. Sunlight rips apart atoms and molecules during the day, intensifying the charge. At night, the atoms and molecules recombine, reducing the charge.

Physicists want to understand how the ionosphere reacts to the temporary loss of sunlight during an eclipse. They will do so with the help of thousands of volunteer ham radio operators, who will exchange messages with others around the planet. During last October’s annular eclipse, when the Moon covered most but not all of the Sun, the experiment showed a large and immediate change in the ionosphere as the sunlight dimmed.

NASA also will launch three small “sounding” rockets, which loft instruments into space for a few minutes, to probe the ionosphere shortly before, during, and shortly after the eclipse.

Another project will use radar to study changes in the interactions between the solar wind and Earth’s atmosphere, while yet another will use a radio telescope to map sunspots and surrounding regions as the Moon passes across them.

One project will piece together images of the eclipse snapped through more than 40 identical telescopes spaced along the path of totality to create a one-hour movie of the eclipse. The telescopes will be equipped with instruments that see the three-dimensional structure of the corona, allowing solar scientists to plot how the corona changes.

23. What have astronomers learned from eclipses?

Solar eclipses have been powerful tools for studying the Sun, the layout of the solar system, and the physics of the universe.

Until the Space Age, astronomers could see the Sun’s corona only during eclipses, so they traveled around the world to catch these brief glimpses of it.

Eclipses also offered a chance to refine the scale of the solar system. Watching an eclipse from different spots on Earth and comparing the angles of the Moon and Sun helped reveal the relative sizes and distances of both bodies, which were important steps in understanding their true distances.

During an eclipse in 1868, two astronomers discovered a new element in the corona. It was named helium, after Helios, a Greek name for the Sun. The element wasn’t discovered on Earth until a quarter of a century later.

An eclipse in 1919 helped confirm General Relativity, which was Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity. The theory predicted that the gravity of a massive body should deflect the path of light rays flying near its surface. During the eclipse, astronomers found that the positions of background stars that appeared near the Sun were shifted by a tiny amount, which was in perfect agreement with Einstein’s equations.

Today, astronomers are using records of eclipses dating back thousands of years to measure changes in Earth’s rotation rate and the distance to the Moon.

24. How did astronomers study eclipses in the past?

With great effort! From the time they could accurately predict when and where solar eclipses would be visible, they organized expeditions that took them to every continent except Antarctica, on trips that lasted months and that sometimes were spoiled by clouds or problems both technical and human.

During the American Revolution, for example, a group of Harvard scientists led by Samuel Williams received safe passage from the British army to view an eclipse from Penobscot Bay, Maine, on October 21, 1780. Williams slightly miscalculated the eclipse path, though, so the group missed totality by a few miles. (The expedition did make some useful observations, however.)

In 1860, an expedition headed by Simon Newcomb, one of America’s top astronomers, journeyed up the Saskatchewan River, hundreds of miles from the nearest city, braving rapids, mosquitoes, and bad weather. After five grueling weeks, they had to stop short of their planned viewing site, although at a location still inside the eclipse path. Clouds covered the Sun until almost the end of totality, however, so the expedition came up empty.

King Mongkut of Siam invited a French expedition and hundreds of other dignitaries to view an eclipse from present-day Thailand in 1868. He built an observatory and a large compound to house his guests at a site Mongkut himself had selected as the best viewing spot. The eclipse came off perfectly, but many visitors contracted malaria. So did Mongkut, who died a few weeks later.

An expedition in 1914, to Russia, was plagued by both clouds and the start of World War I. The team abandoned its instruments at a Russian observatory and escaped through Scandinavia.

The eclipse of July 29, 1878, offered fewer impediments. In fact, it was a scientific and social extravaganza. The eclipse path stretched from Montana Territory to Texas. Teams of astronomers from the United States and Europe spread out along the path. Thomas Edison stationed his group in Wyoming, where he used a tasimeter, a device of his own creation, to try to measure the temperature of the corona. Samuel Pierpoint Langley, a future secretary of the Smithsonian, was atop Pikes Peak in Colorado. Maria Mitchell, perhaps America’s leading female scientist, decamped to Denver. And Asaph Hall, who had discovered the moons of Mars just the year before, journeyed to the flatlands of eastern Colorado.

Thousands of average Americans joined the festivities, paying outrageous prices for some of the best viewing spots. Some things, it seems, never change.

25. What about lunar eclipses?

While solar eclipses happen during new Moon, lunar eclipses occur when the Moon is full, so it aligns opposite the Sun in our sky. The Moon passes through Earth’s shadow. In a total eclipse, the entire lunar disk turns orange or red. In a partial eclipse, Earth’s inner shadow covers only a portion of the Moon. And during a penumbral eclipse, the Moon passes through the outer portion of Earth’s shadow, darkening the Moon so little that most people don’t even notice it.

Lunar eclipses happen as often as solar eclipses—at least twice per year. This is a poor year for lunar eclipses, however. There is a penumbral eclipse on the night of March 24, with the Moon slipping through Earth’s faint outer shadow, and a partial eclipse on the night of September 17, in which the Moon barely dips into the darker inner shadow. Both eclipses will be visible from most of the United States.

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After reading multiple time travel stories, I noticed that it often took 50 to 100 pages to engage the reader in character and conflict and set up the time travel. Following this example allowed me to keep Elizabeth's growth front and center rather than letting time travel take over the whole story. 5. Keeping the focus on the character arc.
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