AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR
From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, 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.
Gleick's story begins at the turn of the twentieth century with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation, The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological — the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilisations, and the perfection of clocks. Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea in the culture — from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Woody Allen to Jorge Luis Borges. He explores 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.
In Time Travel, James Gleick masterfully weaves a narrative that is both a top-notch literary piece and a profound criticism of our understanding of time. The book, hailed as one of the best in its genre, challenges the reader to question their perception of the past, present, and future.
For fans of Carlo Rovelli (Helgoland), Richard Phillips Feynman (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I), Robert M. Sapolsky (Monkeyluv), Helen Czerski (Blue Machine), and Walter Isaacson (Invent and Wander).
