Endless Daytime

This photo was taken at midnight.


Sometimes the night just won't come. The daylight never ends, possibly because of an unusual planetary alignment, solar phenomenon, or even because of a kind of phlebotinum that is actually preventing the day from ending.

Powerful beings will occasionally threaten to invoke Endless Daytime as a punishment or a show of power. This is uncommon, though, and when this does happen, it's more in the vein of "Hah! Look what I can do!" rather than "You'd better do what I say or else". This likely has to do with the fact that humans are generally diurnal and psychologically associate daytime with positive things like warmth, happiness and growth. In fact, it's far more likely for godlike beings, the Big Bad, Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, and Eldritch Abominations to attempt to bring on eternal night instead.

Really long daytime hours are a staple of Science Fiction. The causes of the everlasting daylight could be anything from having multiple suns to having a Hollow World with a sun in the center. On Earth there is a phenomenon (pictured) that causes up to several months of nonstop sunshine in certain parts of the world, but this is rarely used as a setting in Sci Fi. A common explanation is for a planet to be tidally locked[1] to its sun, meaning that one side of the planet will be locked in perpetual daytime while the opposite will be true of the other side.

Contrast The Night That Never Ends, which is the inversion of this trope. This trope is not about Video Games where all levels are always illuminated by midday sun, regardless how long you stay there; see In-Universe Game Clock.

Examples of Endless Daytime include:

Anime & Manga

  • In Dragonball Z, the planet Namek had multiple suns shining on it from all sides, keeping it in perpetual daylight.

Comics

  • Skartaris, the setting for The Warlord, is based on Pellucidar and has a similar 'eternal noon', save at the poles at the very edge of the world.
  • Angel: After the Fall has LA in hell, with both sun and full moon up at the same time, which makes things interesting for werewolves. And vampires. And, well, it's hell.

Film

  • In Last Night, some sort of unspecified disaster is about to end the world and as a result, the sun never stops shining.
  • The planet the protagonists crashland on in Pitch Black orbits three suns, such that it is always sunlight except once every 22 years, when the three suns line up and are simultaneously eclipsed.
  • Star Wars' Ryloth, the Twi'lek homeworld, a tidally locked planet.

Fan Fiction

  • A common trope in My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic fanfics where Princess Celestia goes bad. The eternal day mirrors what her sister, Princess Luna, did in the show's backstory when she became Nightmare Moon.
    • In Solar Eclipse, Princess Celestia refuses to lower the sun and bring about everlasting day.
    • Corona Blaze does the same thing by subjecting her to the same transformation that befell her sister.
    • In Sunshine and Fire, a handful of characters end up stranded in a parallel world where an evil Celestia, known as Daymare Sun, began an eternal day a thousand years ago. Nobody in that world even has a concept of the night, let alone knows the word, and most of the planet has been turned to desert.
    • In the Dresden Files crossover, My Little Denarians, Celestia brings this about after she is corrupted by Discord.

Literature

"The sun hasn't moved for an-- for some t--" Mitzi gave up. "It isn't moving."

  • In Larry Niven's Draco Tavern series, the home planet of the alien Chirpscithra is tidally locked. The species evolved in the "twilight region" around the planet's terminator zone.
  • Sparhawk accidentally causes this in the Elenium, when he uses Bhelliom to help him catch up with Martel ... but leaves the method up to the Troll-Gods.
  • Beasts of Gor takes place in the far northern region of the planet, which has long times of sun and no sun respectively.

"Come along," I said to Poalu. "It will soon be dark." That was true. In a few weeks the Arctic night would descend.

  • Isaac Asimov's short story, and then novel, Nightfall is about a planet whose star system has 6 suns. As a result, the planet is illuminated all the time. Well, almost.
  • The Pellucidar novels are set in a Hollow World that has a sun at the centre. Thus it is always noon in Pellucidar, no matter where you are.
  • In Pyramids, after Reality Goes Out To Lunch, the competing sun gods turn the sun's arc into something akin to a spirited ballgame.
  • In Sandy Mitchell's Warhammer 40,000 Ciaphas Cain novel The Traitor's Hand, all the action happens on a tidally locked planet (though Cain's regiment, made of Valhallan ice warriors, mainly operates on the "dark" side).
  • In 2010: Odyssey Two, monoliths self-replicate inside Jupiter, causing it to reach critical mass and become a star. This defrosts Europa, a tidally-locked moon of Jupiter, allowing it to support intelligent life. This also makes the other moons of Jupiter habitable to humans.
  • In the Millennial Kingdom in the Left Behind book Kingdom Come, there's still a morning and an evening, but the only difference is that the evening sun is less brighter than the morning sun.

Live Action Television

  • One episode of Northern Exposure (set in Alaska) takes place during the Midnight Sun. People go a little crazy. er.
  • In the Stargate SG-1 episode "The Broca Divide", the heroes visit a planet that is tidally locked. While the inhabitants of the "light side" have a Bronze Age culture bearing similarities to the Minoan civilization, the dark side is infected with a plague that turns people into savages.
  • There's a Twilight Zone episode where the Earth is spiraling closer and closer to the sun, and it is perpetually day. Except it turns out the main character is dreaming, and the Earth is actually spiraling AWAY from the sun and freezing.
    • For that to work, the Earth would have to become tidally-locked, meaning the other side would be constantly dark and probably somewhat less hot. And moving away from the sun makes tidal locking highly improbable.

Myth and Legend

  • In The Bible, God causes the sun to stay stationary in the sky for an entire day until the battle between the Israelites and the Amorites is over.
    • There's constant daylight in the New Jerusalem because the Lamb produces the light.
  • In The Book of Mormon, as a sign of Jesus Christ's birth the Sun sets but it doesn't become dark.
  • There's an Old Italian folktale where the Hero makes a bet with his brothers-in-law that the sun will set at midnight. they laugh, and are glad to get all his stuff, but the Hero made a deal with the Sun, and the Sun doesn't set until well past midnight.

Tabletop Games

  • In Magic: The Gathering there are several places where this is the case.
    • The plane of Mirrodin has five suns. There is night time, but it's brief and exaggerated. Basically the only reason this is worth mentioning is the flavor text on Grasp of Darkness.
    • The plane of Serra is bathed in the light of a perpetual sunrise.
    • In Lorwyn "the sun never quite dips below the horizon".
  • In year 374 of RuneQuest's world of Glorantha, the sun stopped in the sky, which halted time. Every culture has a myth explaining why their gods/enemies stopped the sun, and how they or their gods started it again.

Theatre

Video Games

  • In the 24-hour races of Gran Turismo 4 the sun never sets. It's fixed for Gran Turismo 5.
  • In Metroid Prime 3, backstory of the planet Bryyo reveals that the Magic Versus Science war that destroyed the dominant civilization resulted in their planet having one half perpetually in sunlight (reduced to an uninhabitable scorched desert), the other in perpetual darkness (reduced to an uninhabitable frozen wasteland), and only the narrow border between the two sides is still livable.
  • In one of the Ages of Uru, the sun moves horizontally across the sky, never dipping beneath the horizon as it circles.
  • The world of Nie R has perpetual daylight. It's believed that the cataclysm that destroyed the world also disrupted the day/night cycle, which helpfully keeps the Shades at bay.
  • In Dominions it's possible for a sufficiently powerful fire mage to pull this off with the global enchantment Second Sun.

Western Animation

  • An episode of Futurama has extraterrestrial cats come to Earth to transfer all of its momentum to their home planet, resulting in extremely hot weather and perpetual daytime (or night for the half of the planet not shown).
    • There's also the planet from "My Three Suns," where it's rare for all three suns to be down at once.
  • In The Smurfs episode "Queen Smurfette", Father Time fails to bring the close of the day on Smurfette's birthday, resulting in the day never ending until Papa Smurf brings it to Father Time's attention.

Real Life

  • At certain times of the year in the polar regions of the earth, the sun will be visible for months at a time. This phenomenon is known as midnight sun
  • Truth in Television for tidally-locked planets. So far, only theoretical, since none of the Solar System's planets are tidally locked to the Sun, but some exoplanets supposedly are.
  • Mercury, due to its closeness to the Sun, was for a long time though to be tidally locked to our parent star, as the only observations that could be made far from the star's glare showed the same surface features. However in the 60s, radioastronomy showed a 3:2 rotation/orbit resonance which complicated the scenario. While the planet's low inclination affords the poles a perpetual day, areas of the equator can experience the sun rising, stopping in its tracks, going back below the horizon and rising again.
  • The Moon has a mountain near its south pole that is bathed in perpetual sunlight.
  • Interestingly NOT Truth in Television for planets with multiple suns. If the planet orbits both of the stars in a binary system, the suns will always be close together in the sky, and night will still fall. If the planet orbits one of the stars and the other is farther away, it is indeed possible for the two suns to be on opposite sides of the sky and cause almost constant daylight, but...
    • An almost full 24 hours(or whatever the planet's rotation period was) of light wouldn't happen all the time, just when the suns were in opposite parts of the sky (in short, only at the right time of year).
    • When it did happen, it wouldn't be full daylight all day. There would still be a period of twilight as one sun set and the other rose.
    • If the planet and companion star had significantly different orbital inclinations and/or the planet had a high axis tilt, endless day could occur on one hemisphere for decades, but as the other star crossed the ecliptic to shine on the other hemisphere, or moved so that one pole or the other always pointed towards it, just as much time would pass without an endless day.
    • In most cases, the other star would be bright enough to see by, but not enough to affect the planet's temperature significantly or allow photosynthesis.
  1. ↑ That's when an astronomical body rotates in a way so that one specific side is always facing the object it's orbiting.
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