James GleickTime Travel: A History

As usual, Gleick writes about his subject, the cultural phenomenon of interest in time travel, in a insightful and engaging manner. Fans of Gleick's earlier works, however, should know that this book is very different from its predecessors.In Chaos, Gleick described a branch of science that only graduate physics would encounter and explained it to a wider audience. While his work on information science was more wide-ranging it followed a similar pattern. Gleick's biographies of Feynman and Newton explained their contributions to science to those without a technical background.Time Travel, on the other hand, primarily focuses on answering the interesting question, "Why has time travel so consumed the interest of readers of literature since the late 19th century while before it appeared only in hints and scattered fragments?" To answer this, Gleick engages in a thorough review of time-travel literature but only dips his toes into the actual science of time. In other words, the book is more an exploration of a branch of literature than a non-technical introduction to a branch of science.Even so, Time Travel is a good read and I would recommend the book both to those familiar with Gleick's earlier work and those who have not have not enjoyed that particular pleasure.

As a teenager one of my favorite books was H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. I would have given anything to be able to hop onto that Victorian bicycle-type machine, screw on the levers, and roar off into the distant future or ancient past. As James Gleick makes clear in this fascinating book, countless others have shared my dream, both before and after Wells' own time. Time Travel: A History is not an easy book to categorize: it is part scientific treatise, part philosophical musing, and part literary review. It is, however, an easy book with which to fall in love, one of those special though hard to define volumes that makes its readers want to keep it close at hand, to be dipped into whenever the need for wonder is great.The fourteen chapters in Time Travel: A History run roughly, though not consistently, chronologically from the nineteenth century to the present. Of necessity there are a number of scientific and philosophical discussions on whether or not time travel is possible, how, if it should turn out to be possible it might be accomplished, and whether or not such travel would be advisable (the "kill-your-own-grandfather dilemma," for example.) The concepts here are deep, but accessible to an audience which may not have scientific training but does possess a lively sense of curiosity.I found the segments dealing with literary time travel the most interesting. It is rare to find within one volume discussions ranging from Proust to Wells to Heinlein to Le Guin to Finney to Twain to Sterne to Amis to Eliot to Asimov, but Gleick has accomplished it. As a devotee of J.R.R. Tolkien I kept hoping Gleick would include his unfinished time travel tale The Lost Road, but I suppose there have to be limits, even to time travel! (If that piqued your interest I'd recommend Verlyn Flieger's A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to Faerie.)This is a book of less than 350 pages, including a lengthy bibliography which readers looking for more time wanderings will find invaluable, but it holds within it a wealth of knowledge and speculation. Time Travel: A History, is like the rest of James Gleick's work: a book to be read and reread and savored many times.

Time Travel: A History, could have been pretty short. After all, to quote physicist Stephen Hawking, "The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future."But instead of restricting himself to an examination of actual time travel, Gleick leads us through a history of the concept of time travel, which is strikingly modern. Before H.G. Wells, authors and their protagonists dreamt of the past and the future, but no one actually traveled there. Then we leap into a deep discussion of time itself, of memory, and of our dreams of the past and the future. We survey literature, from pulpy short stories of the 1920s and 1930s in such august publications as Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories to the novels of authors ranging from Jules Verne and Philip K. Dick to Jorge Luis Borges and Virginia Woolf. We swim through the treatment of time travel in film, from Twelve Monkeys to Back to the Future to Midnight in Paris. In time, we jump from Augustine writing in the fourth century to Dexter Palmer's 2016 novel Version Control. We hear extensively from physicists and philosophers.This book blew my mind 30 times and I loved it. I highly recommend it, even if you don't have an inherent interest in science fiction.A few bits that I liked: * "Time travel is a fantasy of the modern era." * "Stories are like parasites finding a host. In other words, memes. Arrows of the Zeitgeist." * H.G. Wells: "Literature is revelation," said Wells. "Modern literature is indecorous revelation." * Ursula K. Le Guin: "Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time." * T.S. Eliot: "Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Will not stay still." * Jorge Luis Borges: "El tiempo se bifurca perpetuamente hacia innumerables futuros." * Richard Feynman: "I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything." * "We're not very good at understanding causes." * "You can be a time traveler in your own book. If you're impatient, you can skip ahead to the ending." * In Max Beerbohm's 1916 story, "Enoch Soames," a third-rate poet travels one hundred years into the future to see his legacy, which he imagines will be grand. He finds himself listed only as a fictional character in a short story by one Max Beerbohm.

I purchased this book almost immediately after seeing it reviewed in the newspaper, not because the review was glowing but because it's a subject that instantly appealed to me. The spectrum of books, movies, and tv shows that deal directly or indirectly with the "flow of time" provides rich pickings - Primer, Donnie Darko, Looper, Source Code, Edge of Tomorrow, Arrival, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unfortunately none of these are mentioned, and on the whole those sources that are - Back to the Future, Bill & Ted's, The Terminator, Interstellar, 12 Monkeys - seem to be given a single sentence or a paragraph at most. There are several novels that get more attention (Proust, Gibson), but Gleick's writing neither cast new angles on those that I've read nor inspired me to rush out and read those that I haven’t.Gleick is at his most engaging when talking about HG Wells' The Time Machine, which he uses both as the starting point of the book and as the starting point of a "new mode of thought" about time. The central issue is that from hereon in the book is written more like a stream of consciousness, and without a strong coherent narrative I found it far less impactful than I had hoped. I am presuming that Gleick doesn’t feel that writing a book about time travel gives him a pass on providing a decent narrative. At times he even seems to contradict himself - one chapter starts by stating that time travel in fiction doesn’t usually incur physical symptoms such as discomfort or illness, and then he proceeds to name examples of exactly this phenomenon (there are numerous other books and movies that also contradict this).Despite all of the above, as a clearly intelligent man there is a light engagement to be had from Gleick’s flitting around the subject, like a conversation in which someone approaches a familiar subject from a different angle. Perhaps the reason I found this mildly underwhelming rather than refreshing or inspiring is that I think it could have been so much more - either as a a book about the science or as an in-depth cultural study. Another amazon reviewer supposes that readers who enjoy Proust may rate the book more highly, but that wasn’t my experience. I haven’t read Gleick’s other books, but there was little here to encourage me to do so.

James Gleick is a wonderful raconteur. This book is less scientific inquiry than it is a survey of how writers and scientists toyed with the idea of time travel beginning with H.G. Wells. The only real omission is Lewis Carroll, whose Alice in Wonderland predates The Time Machine and offers a far more engaging foray into the idea of time and space. Of course, other readers will probably find more omissions. Nevertheless, Gleick does a great job of moving back and forth and even sideways in time to show how different scientists and philosophers viewed time, notably Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel, who took walks together ruminating over whether time was a straight or curved line. Godel may have pushed the idea a bit too far for Einstein's taste, but this is the way many physicists view time today. The question is whether time circles back on itself the way Godel imagined and disappears into space like the lines of a parabola. Along the way you get some interesting insights by Nabokov and Proust among other writers. Gleick also shows his sense of humor in referring to one of his favorite films, Groundhog Day. Gleick reveals his own skepticism of time travel, as he describes the various attempts to determine it empirically. This is a book anyone can relate to.

This is a very unusual book - an exploration of time travel in our culture. Quite a cast of characters appear in these pages; Aristotle, Augustine, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Doctor Who, Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Kate Atkinson, to name just a few of philosophers, novelists, and scientists whose work has influenced the way we perceive of the possibility of time travel.This book looks at the literature, movies and science which have explored the possibilities - we have worm holes and Groundhog Day - in a very unusual style, which often feels as if the reader is listening to the author chatting about all that he knows about time travel.

Did not find this a good read. Discursive, meandering and lacking in focus. This author can and usually doe much better. This one is an abberation.

The "Now " lasted for full 15 minutes savouring the book at this point of time .Fully satisfied and fascinated. A must read for one who has patience and hope for a rewarding time.