Publisher Description
“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)
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“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 Russel surmounts; and puzzle over the reversibility of time in the physics with which Einstein revolutionized science….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.
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Booklist *starred review*
