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Summary
Summary
"A time-jumping, head-tripping odyssey." -- The Millions
"A bracing swim in the waters of science, technology and fiction." -- Washington Post
"A thrilling journey of ideas." -- Boston Globe
From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, here is a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on our understanding of time itself.
The story begins at the turn of the previous century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book and an international sensation: The Time Machine . It was an era when a host of forces was converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological: the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks. James Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea that becomes part of contemporary culture--from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Jorge Luis Borges to Woody Allen. He investigates the inevitable looping paradoxes and examines the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Finally, he delves into a temporal shift that is unsettling our own moment: the instantaneous wired world, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.
(With a color frontispiece and black-and-white illustrations throughout)
Author Notes
He wrote the worldwide bestseller Chaos, which was nominated for the National Book Award. He was the 1990 McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Voice actor Shapiro chooses a conversational style of delivery for the audio edition of Gleick's mind-bending book on the cultural history of the concept of time and that concept's evolution in literature and science. Shapiro does an excellent job of relaying this in-depth look at the impossible. Given the complexity of the author's research, a narrator could easily fall into professorial lecturing or an exhaustive, ear-numbing exposition of complex concepts, but Shapiro, while keeping his pacing steady, uses cadence to help convey Gleick's complex ideas and manages to make his delivery upbeat and engaging. He mines the material for its humor and gives what he finds just the right smile-inducing spin. His smooth, confident narration makes the audiobook both entertaining and informative. A Pantheon hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Against Kingsley Amis' skeptical assertion that time travel is inconceivable, Gleick adduces impressive evidence that the phenomenon has tantalized novelists, philosophers, poets, scientists, moviemakers, and even cartoonists as a transformative possibility. Readers follow the fictional Time Traveler that H. G. Wells sends into future centuries; track the gyrations of time-spanning thought that Borges unfolds in his labyrinthine tales; ponder the temporal cause-effect paradoxes that Bertrand Russell surmounts; and puzzle over the reversibility of time in the physics with which Einstein revolutionized science. Though Gleick focuses on the time-travel stories and speculations that have proliferated since 1900, he draws insights from ancient figures Plato, Aristotle, the Buddha, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Augustine who plumbed the mystery of time's flow, eternity's stasis. Ancient fatalism contrasts sharply with the progressivism that defines the trajectory of history for modern thinkers and emboldens would-be time travelers who dream of improving a flawed past (Why not assassinate Hitler in 1935?). Yet as he probes a twenty-first-century cyberworld blending past and future into an often-hallucinatory present, Gleick wonders about the current meaning of time travel. Ultimately, readers discern behind the modern mania for the phenomenon a human craving for immortality that particularly in a secular age fosters this mania. Both piquant and profound.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
I WAS 10 years old when my brother handed me Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" with the endorsement that it was "probably the raddest story ever." The action opens in 2055, and the United States has just elected a moderate presidential candidate named Keith over a strongman named Deutscher, "an anti-everything man for you, a militarist, Antichrist, anti-human, anti-intellectual." Hmmm. In the story a hubristic big-game hunter named Eckels pays Time Safari Inc. $10,000 to ride a time machine 60 million years back in time to shoot a rather vividly rendered T. rex. But there's a Red Riding Hood-style catch: Eckels must stay on "the Path," an antigravity sidewalk Time Safari Inc. has suspended over the jungle floor. Why? Because, the lead hunter explains, "the stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our Earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations." Eckels, of course, stumbles off the Path and squashes a butterfly, "a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time." When the hunting party gets back to the future, guess who the president-elect is? "Not that fool weakling Keith," declares the desk jockey at Time Safari Inc. "We got an iron man now, a man with guts!" (All of which makes one worry that a dino-hunter from 2055 has recently been mucking around in the underbrush of the Mesozoic.) At age 10,1 was gripped by Bradbury's dramatization. I read the story a half-dozen times, then stepped gingerly through the yard, wondering if every ant I squashed spelled doom for civilization in 3924. As I grew, so did the number of time travel stories I devoured. I watched Superman spin the Earth backward; I watched John Connor send a young soldier (who was somehow also his dad?) back in time to protect his mom from a Terminator; I watched Keanu Reeves offer Genghis Khan a Twinkie in Bill and Ted's (not so) Excellent Adventure. Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis's "Time's Arrow" wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to More-Recently-Than-Then. Indeed, as a world culture, we have indulged in so many time travel stories that, in 2011, China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television officially denounced them, charging that they sually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation." That's enough to start any storyteller building her time machine. Enter James Gleick's "Time Travel: A History." Bad news first: Though the title might suggest otherwise, this is not a book sent through a wormhole from the future to detail the glorious evolution of time travel. Darn it. Gleick even goes so far as to declare that literal time travel, as imagined and reimagined by writers over the decades, "does not exist. It cannot." The good news? "Time Travel," like all of Gleick's work, is a fascinating mash-up of philosophy, literary criticism, physics and cultural observation. It's witty ("Regret is the time traveler's energy bar"), pithy ("What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track") and regularly manages to twist its reader's mind into those Gordian knots I so loved as a boy. "Time Travel" begins at what Gleick believes is the beginning, H.G. Wells's 1895 "The Time Machine." "When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine," Gleick argues, "he also invented a new mode of thought." Western science was undergoing a sea change at the same time, of course: Lyell and Darwin had exploded older conceptions of the age of the Earth, locomotives and telegraphs were transforming space, and Einstein was about to punch a major hole in Newton's theory of absolute time. Meanwhile, in literature, Marcel Proust was using memory to complicate more straightforward storytelling, and it wouldn't be long before modernists like Woolf and Joyce were compressing, dilating, and folding time in half. But according to Gleick, Wells was the first to marry the words "time" and "travel," and in doing so, "The Time Machine" initiated a kind of butterfly effect, the novel fluttering with each passing decade through the souls of more and more storytellers, who in turn influenced more and more of their successors, forking from Robert Heinlein to Jorge Luis Borges to Isaac Asimov to William Gibson to Woody .Allen to Kate Atkinson to Charles Yu, until, to use Bradbury's metaphor, the gigantic dominoes fell. Nowadays, Gleick writes, "Time travel is in the pop songs, the TV commercials, the wallpaper. From morning to night, children's cartoons and adult fantasies invent and reinvent time machines, gates, doorways and windows, not to mention time ships and special closets, DeLoreans and police boxes." It's also in the science. Gleick is a polymathic thinker who can quote from David Foster Wallace's undergraduate thesis as readily as from Kurt Gödel or Lord Kelvin, and like many of the storytellers he thumbnails, he employs time travel to initiate engrossing discussions of causation, fatalism, predestination and even consciousness itself. He includes a humorously derisive chapter on people who bury time capsules ("If time capsulists are enacting reverse archaeology, they are also engaging in reverse nostalgia"), he tackles cyberspace ("Every hyperlink is a time gate"), and throughout the book he displays an acute and playful sensitivity to how quickly language gets slippery when we talk about time. Why, for example, do English speakers say the future lies ahead and the past lies behind, while Mandarin speakers say future events are below and earlier events are above? "If you say," he writes, "that an activity wastes time, implying a substance in finite supply, and then you say that it fills time, implying a sort of container, have you contradicted yourself?" (A footnote here: Gleick is a brilliant footnoter; never more than in this book have I been reminded of how footnotes can function as breaks in the time of a writer's sentences, wormholes in the space-time of a paragraph.) As in his 2011 exploration of information theory, "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood," Gleick's greatest skill in "Time Travel" is to synthesize: He sees practice in theory, literature in science, Augustine in Rivka Galchen. If this new book can sometimes feel like a mind-smashing catalog of literary and filmic references to time travel, it's also a wonderful reminder that the most potent time-traveling technology we have is also the oldest technology we have: storytelling. Read averse of Homer and you can walk the walls of Troy alongside Hector; fall into a paragraph by Fitzgerald and your Now entangles with Gatsby's Now; open a 1953 book by Bradbury and go hunting T. rexes with Eckels. Gleick's epigraph to his penultimate chapter comes from Ursula Le Guin: "Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time," and she's right, of course. The shelves of every library in the world brim with time machines. Step into one, and off you go. A reminder that the most potent time-traveling technology is storytelling. ANTHONY DOERR'S most recent book is "All the Light We Cannot See."
Guardian Review
A survey that takes in HG Wells, Einstein and Doctor Who claims science is too heavily influenced by fiction We all travel in time mentally when we think about the past or the future, and I for one close my eyes every night and travel instantaneously into tomorrow. But the idea of some kind of technology that allows us to literally transport ourselves to a different era is surprisingly recent. James Gleick's historical survey of the concept concludes that, apart from a couple of vague anticipations in the 19th century, the idea really was invented in 1895, in HG Wells's novel The Time Machine. Cue more than a century of literary, philosophical and scientific investigations into the topic. There are logical knots aplenty, as when people travel back in time to kill their ancestors (the Grandfather Paradox). There are alt-history fantasies of killing Hitler. There is a flux capacitor powering a DeLorean time machine; there is a Time Lord zooming around in an old police phone box; and there is the head-spinning set of nested time loops in Shane Carruth's extraordinary micro-budget first film, Primer. The last example is not mentioned in this book, but a lot else is, including more metaphorical forms of time travel: there is a fascinating, wry chapter, for example, on the craze for burying cultural objects inside "time capsules" in the hope that our descendants won't think we were all complete idiots. (The time capsule, Gleick writes, is "a tragi-comic time machine. It lacks an engine, goes nowhere, sits and waits.") From Jorge Luis Borges's story "The Garden of Forking Paths" to TS Eliot, entropy and free will, the book is rich with associative detail. At first, time travel seemed a harmless fantasy, until Kurt Godel showed Albert Einstein that his equations of relativity allowed solutions in which time travel appeared to be possible, although no one yet knows exactly how. Mathematicians and physicists got to work, and they haven't stopped yet. The best argument against the possibility of time travel is probably that supplied by Stephen Hawking, who has pointed out that we are not invaded by hordes of tourists from the future. (Hawking posits that somehow metaphysically embedded within the universe is a "Chronology Protection Principle".) But that is not a knockdown argument, because many serious scientific hypotheses about time travel forbid travelling back to a time before the first time machine was invented. In that case, unfortunately, we will never be able to go back and see the dinosaurs. But also it means that we are not invaded by time travellers from the future simply because the first time machine has not yet been invented. Curiously, though, Gleick does not go into much detail about the scientific work on time travel of the last few decades, because he is convinced that physicists working on the subject have just read too much science fiction (they have, he condescendingly writes, been "unwittingly conditioned" by it), and are wasting their own and everyone else's, um, time. There is, for example, no reference at all to one of the leading such researchers, the astrophysicist J Richard Gott. (Interested readers should consult his excellent book Time Travel in Einstein's Universe.) On the other hand, the book expends very many pages on laborious plot summaries of more-or-less obscure time-travel fictions of the last century. Nor, moreover, is Gleick much impressed by what he considers the "futile" philosophical writing on time that he has consulted. One example is the famous 1962 paper on fatalism by Richard Taylor, which begins: "A fatalist -- if there is any such -- thinks he cannot do anything about the future", so it is "pointless for him to deliberate about what he is going to do". This started a long and complicated argument in the philosophical literature, an unimportant footnote to which is that, after David Foster Wallace 's death, his undergraduate essay on the topic was published, along with Taylor's original paper, as Fate, Time and Language, in order, or so a cynic might think, to cash in on DFW's posthumous literary celebrity. Gleick here seems to have just swallowed the publisher's claim that the future novelist managed to refute Taylor wholesale. At the end of another chapter, with the air of revealing a profound truth, Gleick writes: "What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track." A fair response would be to ask: "OK, what is change?" It's intriguing that Gleick would choose to write a history of an idea that he deems not only impossible by ridiculous What, then, is Gleick's cultural diagnosis? He argues that the persistent dream of time travel is a cultural fantasy of escaping the worries of the present, and in particular of eluding death. This is perceptive and no doubt true, but it would still be true even if time travel were in fact theoretically possible. The author, however, seems too impatient to keep an open mind on the matter. This is all rather baffling for any fan of Gleick's earlier, brilliant works such as Genius, his biography of Richard Feynman, and Chaos : this writer, after all, more or less invented the modern style of mind-bending scientific non-fiction that does not talk down to its audience. Time Travel is written with his usual elegance, but there is something morose about it, as though, having embarked on the work, he now can't believe he is obliged to put all these supposedly clever people right about their stupid fantasies. Indeed, one ends the book intrigued mostly by the quirk of authorial psychology by which someone would choose to write a history of an idea that he is convinced is not only impossible but ridiculous. So I prefer the cheerier hypothesis that someone has already made the first time machine in their garage, and the widespread adoption of the technology is going to lead to utter disaster. Luckily, there is a hero who will stop this happening: future James Gleick, who has travelled back in time to smash the time machine he emerges from and write this book to convince everybody that there's no point ever trying to build another one. Let's hope it works. - Steven Poole.
Library Journal Review
Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science) examines the concept of time travel by means of a longitudinal review of fiction, science (especially physics and astronomy), philosophy, pop culture, and sociology. He begins in the late 19th century with H.G. Wells and his story of the time machine. This was not the first mention of time travel in literature, but it was the first time the idea of a time "machine" was offered. The work then moves on to more pragmatic aspects of time travel incorporating the laws of thermodynamics, Isaac Newton's work on gravity, and the concept of space and time being related. Addressing time capsules, going to the past and killing Hitler, speculative and historical fiction, alternative universes, the paradox of time travel, self-fulfilling prophecies, Isaac Azimov, Doctor Who, and quantum physics, the examination of the topic is vast and spectacular. Narrator Rob Shapiro's baritone lulls the reader into the vast arena of Gleick's mind. Shapiro is also able to convey the humor found throughout the book. VERDICT Fans of Gleick's previous works, scientific postulators, philosophers, and anyone interested in the topic and concept of time travel will find much to enjoy.-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.