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Time Travel Paperback – 7 Sept. 2017

by James Gleick (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars 673 ratings

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.

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  1. Print length
    352 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Fourth Estate
  4. Publication date
    7 Sept. 2017
  5. Dimensions
    13 x 2.2 x 18.5 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    9780007544455
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0007544455
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Review

'Skilfully weaves together science, technology and culture in a dazzling history of time travel' New Statesman

‘A glorious compendium of conundrums and mind-bogglers … What one reveres Gleick for are the bridges he opens between high science, which he and a few other cognoscenti understand, and the low fiction that everyone enjoys. That’s the word to end with: “enjoy”. In whatever universe you happen to be reading this’ The Times

‘Wonderful and deceptively unassuming … Time, for us, is movement in stasis: we cannot travel backwards or forwards in it but are stuck in the moment, although the moment is always new. This is a profound mystery, and one that the greatest minds throughout history have been unable to make even a start at solving… (Gleick is) possessed of a splendidly dry wit’ Irish Times

‘Time Travel is written with his usual elegance’ Guardian

‘Endlessly fascinating and as thorough as you like, but written with his customary grace and wit’ Spectator

‘This book is a bit like you imagine time travel to be: a dizzying mind-rush through a century of ideas, some lingered over, some only glimpsed; some clearly seen, some blurry. It is vertiginous, exciting, paradoxical – and worth making the journey’ Sunday Times

‘Enthralling…in these pages, time flies’ John Banville

‘Time Travel regularly manages to twist its reader’s mind … A wonderful reminder that the most potent time-travelling technology we have is also the oldest technology we have: storytelling’ Anthony Doerr

‘Superb … Rich in obscure and illuminating information, laced with lyricism, wit, and startling and convincing insights’ Joyce Carol Oates

‘Weird, enthralling, surreal, dreamlike, almost intoxicating’ Irish Independent

‘Gleick 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’ Guardian

About the Author

James Gleick was born in New York in 1954. He worked for ten years as an editor and reporter for The New York Times. He is the bestselling author of Chaos, Genius, Faster, What Just Happened and a biography of Isaac Newton.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0007544456
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fourth Estate
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ 7 Sept. 2017
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780007544455
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0007544455
  • Item weight ‏ : ‎ 236 g
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13 x 2.2 x 18.5 cm
  • Best Sellers Rank: 662,463 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • Customer reviews:
    4.1 out of 5 stars 673 ratings

About the author

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James Gleick

James Gleick

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James Gleick was born in New York and began his career in journalism, working as an editor and reporter for the New York Times. He covered science and technology there, chronicling the rise of the Internet as the Fast Forward columnist, and in 1993 founded an Internet startup company called The Pipeline. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

His home page is at http://around.com, and on Twitter he is @JamesGleick.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
673 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book thought-provoking, with one review noting how it takes readers on a journey through history and philosophy. Moreover, the book receives positive feedback for its exploration of time travel in literature. However, the narrative quality receives negative feedback, with one customer describing it as meandering.

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Value for moneyThought provokingTime travelNarrative quality
6 customers mention ‘Value for money’6 positive0 negative

Customers find the book to be excellent value for money.

"This review is for the Kindle edition. I had a great time with this book!..." Read more

"Well worth a read if you've an interest in time travel as a subject." Read more

"...for full 15 minutes savouring the book at this point of time .Fully satisfied and fascinated...." Read more

"This is an excellent book, looking at all aspects of time travel mainly in fiction from a variety of directions...." Read more

4 customers mention ‘Thought provoking’4 positive0 negative

Customers find the book thought-provoking, with one review noting how it takes readers on a journey through history and philosophy.

"...I had a great time with this book! Mr. Gleick takes the reader on a history and philosophy (and physics) of time travel in literature, with Wells'..." Read more

"...savouring the book at this point of time .Fully satisfied and fascinated...." Read more

"I enjoyed the book , some interesting info ." Read more

"Intriguing facts and conclusions, but a little too many" Read more

4 customers mention ‘Time travel’4 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the time travel elements in the book, with one mentioning its sideways approach to the concept.

"...the reader on a history and philosophy (and physics) of time travel in literature, with Wells' story as the springboard...." Read more

"...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..." Read more

"This is a very unusual book - an exploration of time travel in our culture...." Read more

"This is an excellent book, looking at all aspects of time travel mainly in fiction from a variety of directions...." Read more

3 customers mention ‘Narrative quality’0 positive3 negative

Customers find the narrative quality of the book unsatisfactory, with one customer noting it lacks a strong coherent structure, while another describes it as meandering and ultimately disappointing.

"...is written more like a stream of consciousness, and without a strong coherent narrative I found it far less impactful than I had hoped...." Read more

"Books, stories, readers and authors fill this ultimately disappointing essay; there is a little space for philosophy and less for science...." Read more

"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." Read more

Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • JaspMasqueline
    5.0 out of 5 stars Fun and thought-provoking
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 October 2016
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    This review is for the Kindle edition.

    I had a great time with this book! Mr. Gleick takes the reader on a history and philosophy (and physics) of time travel in literature, with Wells' story as the springboard. He establishes pretty quickly that despite some clever precursors, it's Herbert's story that inspired all that followed. The works referred to are very well chosen, not so many as to overwhelm the argument, but easily enough for me to find plenty of new books (fiction and fact) that I just have to acquire.

    The really delightful thing is that Gleick assumes a basic vocabulary on the part of his readers- there's very little of the common ground that many books on time feel they need to cover, and this accelerates the process tremendously. Let's face if, if this book interests you, you will already know what Augustine said, and you won't need to dwell on it. By the end I had learned a great deal more about time... and my bookshelf had gained a lot of weight!

    The Kindle edition is well-formatted and I noticed no typos. One oddity, though: loc. 1397 "the troglodytic Eloi and bovine Morlocks"!
    15 people found this helpful
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  • Paul Gardiner
    4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 January 2018
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    Well worth a read if you've an interest in time travel as a subject.
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  • Eduardo
    3.0 out of 5 stars Had hoped for more...
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 June 2017
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    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.
    9 people found this helpful
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  • James Ferguson
    5.0 out of 5 stars A Bend in Time
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 April 2018
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    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.
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  • Kunal Phanse
    5.0 out of 5 stars Time and again
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 September 2017
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    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.
    One person found this helpful
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  • markr
    4.0 out of 5 stars Time travel - through lots of angles
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 April 2017
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    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.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • S.M.G.Hodge
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent overview ans analysis
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 November 2016
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    This is an excellent book, looking at all aspects of time travel mainly in fiction from a variety of directions. I have been collecting time travel stories for at least 50 years, and Mr Gleick has picked up on almost all the ones I remember. He doesn't come to any definitive conclusion, but it is a most diverting journey
    2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars James Gleick offers hope for the past, present, and future
    Reviewed in the United States on 26 January 2017
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    This mostly accessible book covers vast cultural, philosophic, and scientific terrain, under the premise of examining time travel -- a possibility, a paradox, a phenomenon? First, James Gleick is my favorite non-fiction author, bar none. So I'm a big fan. Second, the topic is of deep interest to me, not just because of my last name (Rip VW could be called a time traveller, sleeping for 20 years), but also because it is a fascinating trope in our culture that allows for some pretty fun storytelling.

    The scientific worldview that Gleick comes from is a frame for examination of ideas. He takes the idea of time travel and traces its origins, beginning with the H.G. Wells novel The Time Traveller, but of course starting much earlier than that, in fits and starts, with let's say the industrial revolution. That's where we get our "modern" sense of time as something that can be synchronized and structured by things like time zones. In physics, time begins to be "measured" around the time of Sir Isaac Newton, but Newton used his heartbeat to time his experiments, I believe. The invention of mechanical clocks and the discovery of longitude are outside the scope of Gleick's book, but they are important scientific and technological achievements -- not the subject of the book, but related to it. Newton's laws of physics take time as an essential element (velocity = distance/time). But what is time?

    Now we're really thinking. We discover through Gleick's analysis that time is both psychological and experiential, as well as paradoxical -- we know what it is until we try to describe it. Is it subjective or objective? Does it "flow" like a river? No, Gleick concludes, that is strictly a metaphor. And, I discovered by reading this book, the Latin motto tempus fugit means not, as I had assumed, time flies, but rather, time flees. Time escapes rational characterization. And time travel turns out to be both a logical impossibility (causes lead to effects, after all) and a possibility in physics (time can run backward or forward, based on the sign in an equation -- just as the irrational number i, the square root of -1, is a logical impossibility that creates all kinds of interesting possibilities, so too is -t).

    So, Gleick is having some fun with the idea of time travel, in a discursive, almost deconstructive way. He mentions an artist almost in passing, Chris Marker, who "may have been a time traveller," it appears, but created a work of art (film) named la jetee, about memory, remembrance, forgetfulness, and film, that I defy any modern filmmaker to beat. I haven't seen it, so I can't say with confidence that it is a good film, but it is interesting, to say the least. In any event, Gleick takes us through cultural and scientific ideas of time travel, ranging from time capsules (which he says are a somewhat foolish way to try to evade death) to novels like The Time Traveller, to Dr. Who (a hard-won favorite of mine, too), and aims at answering the question of whether time travel is possible or desirable, based on such cultural phenomena.

    His answer is yes, but with some caveats. First, he believes time travel is an act of the imagination that is valuable, much as dreaming or fiction generally is valuable. He isn't interested in the paradoxes or "rules" of sci-fi time travel so much, though he does mention them. Instead, what he's interested in are the stories that break the rules -- the so-called "bootstrap paradox" gets a whole chapter, for example, based on Robert Heinlein's comic short story in which a character named Bob interacts with various versions of himself who have traveled through time. What he's after is what those stories reveal about the nature of time and life itself. Second, he doesn't think time travel is really possible, although it turns out the laws of physics don't contradict it necessarily, except maybe entropy. He talks about popular physicist Richard Hawking holding a dinner party for time travellers, invitations issued after the fact, to which no one came, as an example of the logical fallacy of cause coming after effect. He also mentions the Biblical account in Joshua where God stops the sun to create a longer day, but dismisses it as wishful thinking, "who hasn't wished for more hours in the day?" He doesn't dismiss the possibility of time travel outright, either in fiction or in real life, but he comes to a conclusion of sorts about the limitation of the scientific equations to really describe reality, in that what appears possible in some senses based on Einstein's space-time continuum and other physics equations, isn't possible in our experience, except in fiction.

    Time travel is therefore essential to our culture. It is both possible and impossible. It is a paradox and a mystery, but also a cold hard fact, that time travel is not possible. Or is it? So much of our storytelling these days involves time travel that we've gotten used to it; it's part of the culture. In the end, Gleick's concluding chapter on our current times is a little disheartening. The future is dystopian these days, not just because that view of time travel has won out, whether from 1984 on or from the invention of the Internet, I'm not sure; but also because we have shorter memories and shorter futures than we thought we did in the 1960s, say. The Internet has a way of foreshortening both past and future -- after all, we have access to a wealth of knowledge there, but, as Gleick says, "who has time to think?" Books like Gleick's, though, give me some hope that we can rise above our current predicament and invent a future that is better than our present, still.
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  • Kartik Mishra
    5.0 out of 5 stars The Master of Science Writing Does It Again
    Reviewed in India on 26 December 2016
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    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?
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  • Wolfischer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Todos aspectos do tempo.
    Reviewed in Brazil on 28 February 2017
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    Começando por uma análise do conceito de viagem no tempo na obra de H.G.Wells, o livro leva a uma profunda avaliação do próprio conceito de tempo
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  • Sergio Santilli
    5.0 out of 5 stars Explain what time is?
    Reviewed in Italy on 25 February 2019
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    That's really hard. Furthermore, could you explain how to move into something that you can't absolutely figure out?
    This pleasant book deepens this impossible endeavour and in doing so explains in addition lots of mankind's ideas, concepts and theories about this much evasive subject.
    Readers will find out thoughts form philosophers, scientists and science-fiction writers, all very nicely presented.
    It's a pleasure to read it.
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  • Phill Boas
    4.0 out of 5 stars What does it mean to take TIME travel Seriously?
    Reviewed in Australia on 6 June 2017
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    If you wish to write Sci Fi and be involved with time travel you need to read this book. There are ideas that float around about time and its relationship to everything about us.This delightful, well written well researched book is the place to begin.
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