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Park City teen’s second novel muses ‘Time Never Stops’

Nora Wall, a Park City High School junior, wrote her new science fiction book “Time Never Stops” during her 2018 summer vacation.
Courtesy of Nora Wall

What: “Time Never Stops: Musings of the Last Man”

Author: Nora Wall

Cost: $8.99 for paperback; $7.29 for Kindle

Publisher: Amazon Services LLC

Web: amazon.com

Nora Wall, a 16-year-old Park City High School junior, says her new book, “Time Never Stops: Musings of the Last Man,” is not a sequel to her 2018 young-adult novel debut, “Dominion.”

While “Dominion” is about a young woman who lives in a future dystopia, “Time Never Stops,” which is available at Amazon, is a collection of short stories framed by the tale of a failed writer who is the last human to die after the moon collides with the Earth in the year 3078.

“The whole arc is centered around his belief that his stories won’t be remembered by anyone, because no one had read them,” Wall said. “But the idea is that the universe will remember the stories, because it knew he wrote them, and the Earth will always have that memory of him.”



“Time Never Stops” grew out of a short story that Wall had written when she was 12 about an Earth-moon collision.

The idea is that the universe will remember the stories, because it knew he wrote them…” Nora Wall, “Time Never Stops: Musings of the Last Man” author

“I submitted it to a short-story competition, but it didn’t win, because it was poorly written,” she said with a laugh. “I recently rediscovered the story and thought I would build something out of it.”



The format of her new book alternates from the man’s viewpoint to the Earth’s and Universe’s viewpoints, according to the author.

“Since the new book is collection of short stories, and each of them are different, I didn’t have to keep following along with the same narrative,” she said. “I focused on the main concepts of time, the planet and reality in general, and just thought about how they would interact.”

“Time Never Stops” was a lot easier for Wall to write compared to “Dominion,” because of how she outlined the book.

“Many of the short stories are science fiction,” Wall said. “I read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut, Ayn Rand and George Orwell, and like the sort of dark, dystopian themes. So I played off some of these concepts.”

The Earth and Universe also become characters to give the book a more emotional appeal, and the man’s character remained constant in lamenting that he was a failure, she said.

The man was inspired by a “Twilight Zone” episode, “Time Enough at Last,” which Wall watched when she was a child.

“It’s about a man, and all he wants to do is read, but he never has time to do that because everyone keeps bothering him,” she said. “When he finds out he’s the last surviving man on Earth, he feels he has time enough at last to read, but then he breaks his glasses.”

Wall’s late grandfather, Douglas E. Hudon, introduced her to the iconic 1960s sci-fi series, so she dedicated her book to him, she said.

Wall wrote most of the installations for “Time Never Stops” at night during summer break two years ago.

“There were so many different ideas that I had going on, and I was able to invent new places and scenes,” she said. “I didn’t know when I would stop writing, or how long the stories would be. And that made it more fun to write.”

The author feels “Time Never Stops” showcases how her writing capabilities have improved.

“It’s definitely more mature in terms of style,” she said.


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