Time Travel: A History - James Gleick

   2016; 313 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Literary Criticism; Time Travel; Non-Fiction; Philosophy; Science Fiction; Physics.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

 

    Hey, let’s write a comprehensive book all about Time Travel.

 

    No problem.  We’ll just throw a bunch of complicated Quantum Physics equations on a page, demonstrating Time to be the Fourth Dimension, and that it’s theoretically possible to move both forward and backwards through it.

 

    We already move forward through it, of course.  We even know how to slow that rate down: just travel at the speed of light.  Speeding the rate up is a bit trickier, and moving backward through Time is incredibly difficult, but Einstein says it’s possible and he’s never wrong.

 

    Great!  So, do you think we can present all this in 300 pages or so?

 

    Actually we can wrap it all up in about five pages.  Ten pages if we double-space everything.

 

    Yikes! That’s not enough for a book.  What else can we write about Time Travel besides the science-y stuff?

 

   Well, there’s a lot of Sci-Fi stories out there that involve moving back and forth through Time.  We can show how various authors imagined the subject.  And since there’s no evidence that any time travelers have ever visited us, no one can say that any of them are wrong about how to time-travel.

 

    That’s a great idea.  Any other fields of study that we can tap into for Time Travel enlightenment?

 

    There’s always Philosophy and Logic.  Philosophers and logicians can give you an inscrutable and savvy-sounding opinion about almost anything, including things like Eternity, Infinity, and why Time “flows like a river”.

 

What’s To Like...

    James Gleick’s book, Time Travel: A History, is divided into 14 chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of either Time Itself or Traveling Through Time.  My favorites were:

    Ch. 02 : Fin de Siècle.  How people in 1900 foresaw the future world.

    Ch. 09 : Buried Time.  Time Capsules and Time Crypts.

    Ch. 10 : Backward.  What sci-fi says about going back into the Past.

    Ch. 11 : Paradoxes.  What if you went back and killed your grandfather.  Or Hitler.

    Your faves will be different, and each chapter had parts that resonated with me.

 

    The book is a blend of the three areas cited in the introduction: Science (mostly Quantum Physics), Science-Fiction, and Philosophy/Logic.  That sounds like an awkward fit, but kudos to James Gleick for making it work.  There’s a smattering of photographs, diagrams, and footnotes scattered throughout the text, a useful “Index” in the back, along with a fabulous, 6-page “Sources and Further Reading” section that lists all sorts of Time Travel novels, most of which I’d never heard of before.  And the cover image for the hardcover version that I read, pictured above, is quite clever.

 

    The book is a trivia trove of time-travel literature.  I was surprised that the term “Time Travel” didn’t occur until 1914 and that the author “Ellery Queen” doesn’t exist (although Ellery Queen the protagonist does).   Kurt Vonnegut’s “Tralfamadorians” made me smile, as did the dynamic duo of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”.  Mr. Peabody and Sherman’s “Wayback Machine”, more correctly rendered as “WABAC”, brought back great childhood memories.

 

    The history references were entertaining as well. I was already familiar with the development of Time Zones (the invention of railroads necessitated them), as well as the rather lame rationale for Daylight Saving Time (here in Arizona we don’t use it).  I also knew that “Time Dilation” has already been scientifically proven: astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year in space in a high-speed orbit actually aged 8.6 milliseconds less than the rest of us Earthlings over that time.  I was not aware, however, that something called “chronesthesia”, aka “mental time travel”, is already being investigated by neuroscientists.

 

    There were lots of eye-openers for me.  H.G. Wells, author of the derivative novel The Time Machine, didn’t personally believe in Time Travel, and became quite cynical about it later in life.  Pulp Fiction magazines were responsible for giving the Science Fiction genre its start.  And the sentence “Time flows like a river, fruit flies like a banana” made my head hurt.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.2/5 based on 293 ratings and 149 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.58/5 based on 4,013 ratings and 674 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Retronym (n.) : a new term created from an existing word in order to distinguish it from the meaning that has emerged through progress or technological development.  Example: “cloth diaper” – a retronym necessitated by the fact that “diaper” now more commonly refers to a disposable diaper.

Others: Cynosure (n.).

 

Excerpts...

    Nowadays we voyage through time so easily and so well, in our dreams and in our art.  Time travel feels like an ancient tradition, rooted in old mythologies, old as gods and dragons.  It isn’t.  Though the ancients imagined immortality and rebirth and lands of the dead, time machines were beyond their ken.  Time travel is a fantasy of the modern era.  When (H.G.) Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine, he also invented a new mode of thought.  (pg. 4)

 

    The (TV) screen starts up again.  The Doctor appears to be answering the big question.  “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,” he explains, “but actually from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly … timey wimey … stuff.”

    “Started well, that sentence,” Sally snarks (for who among us has never talked back to the TV?).

    The on-screen Doctor answers, “It got away from me, yeah.”  (pg. 299)

 

Why do we need time travel?  All the answers come down to one.  To elude death.  (pg. 309)

    The quibbles are small.  There were a few times that the text got tedious for me, mostly when a philosopher decided to go on at length about some dull topic.  Chapter 12 in particular, provocatively titled What Is Time, bored me, mostly because it was a dry, philosophical treatise.

 

    Some reviewers thought the science-y parts were dull, while others thought everything BUT the science-y parts were dull.  And there were moments when James Gleick’s own comments hinted that he was having to deal with something or someone that he found tedious.

 

    There were three instances of cussing, which would be incredibly clean for a novel, but not for a science-oriented, non-fiction work.  To be fair, they were all caused by direct quotations, the most egregious of which was from an Ursula K. Le Guin book, The Lathe of Heaven: “the riots, and the f*ck-ins, and the Doomsday Band, and the Vigilantes.”

 

    My last quibble is a personal one and the least important.  For all the great Time Travel novels that are listed in the back, I was disappointed that Danger: Dinosaurs! by Evan Hunter was not included.  It was written in 1953, I probably acquired it in grade school via the “Weekly Reader” program, it was my introduction to Time Travel, and I've never forgotten the book.

 

    I enjoyed Time Travel: A History.  I think that, due to the diversity of influences (science, sci-fi, philosophy), it was inevitable that a few dry spots would crop up, but overall it was both enlightening and entertaining, which is what I want from any non-fiction work.  Kudos to James Gleick for tackling this subject.

 

    7½ Stars.  We’ll close with a teaser:  A "Time Crypt" built in 1936 at Oglethorpe University (a Presbyterian college in Atlanta, Georgia) will remain sealed until the year 8113 AD.  Why'd they pick that particular year?  (Answer in the comments.)