Time Travel

Time Travel
James Gleick

AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEARFrom 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.

Copyright (#ulink_0447ba01-e589-5497-9b9b-672e43d42d29)

4th Estate

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016

First published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2016

Text © James Gleick 2016

James Gleick asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company for permission to reprint excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot, and renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Grateful acknowledgment is also made to Faber & Faber Ltd for permission to reprint excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. © The Estate of T.S. Eliot. Reproduced by kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

Cover photograph © Bob Mawby/Shutterstock

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008207670

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780007544448

Version: 2017-08-25

Dedication (#ulink_ff68a679-350d-5672-965a-d259bbab0ffd)

To Beth, Donen, and Harry

Epigraph (#ulink_8620b7b6-3a49-5b76-9218-a12586812c64)

Your now is not my now; and again, your then is not my then; but my now may be your then, and vice versa. Whose head is competent to these things?

—Charles Lamb (1817)

The fact that we occupy an ever larger place in Time is something that everybody feels.

—Marcel Proust (1927?)

And tomorrow

Comes. It’s a world. It’s a way.

—W. H. Auden (1936)

Contents

Cover (#u12ac8cd1-a6d9-5f70-bcfa-e3a2d0a21c8e)

Title Page (#u01cc6f9b-083b-58ba-80a4-c44835bde14a)

Copyright (#u8e3e94a6-97d9-5a2e-a333-ea0d7959fdb3)

Dedication (#u5c45c2c6-9e0d-56c6-9991-fc8c74fb9653)

Epigraph (#u1e6f21b7-df10-5414-969e-14432302a2a1)

1 Machine (#u53b17bad-4574-57e8-8ce6-edceb1f20796)

2 Fin de Siècle (#u014b6791-a5e3-5085-8ccb-cf281f89a116)

3 Philosophers and Pulps (#uc2a075ac-5b2f-592e-9688-0346dfcda893)

4 Ancient Light (#u644673d3-bf99-5794-8062-38aef11bb9cc)

5 By Your Bootstraps (#litres_trial_promo)

6 Arrow of Time (#litres_trial_promo)

7 A River, a Path, a Maze (#litres_trial_promo)

8 Eternity (#litres_trial_promo)

9 Buried Time (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Backward (#litres_trial_promo)

11 The Paradoxes (#litres_trial_promo)

12 What Is Time? (#litres_trial_promo)

13 Our Only Boat (#litres_trial_promo)

14 Presently (#litres_trial_promo)