Time Travel: A History

by James Gleick

Rob Shapiro (Narrator)

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.

• ISBN10: 073528590X
• ISBN13: 9780735285903
• Publish Date: 27 September 2016
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Imprint: Books on Tape
• Edition: Bot Exclusive ed.
• Format: Audiobook (CD)
• Duration: 10 hours and 1 minutes
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

It takes a lot to make time travel boring for me. A lot, a lot. This was not the book I expected, which is part of the problem, but the book that it is did nothing to win me over. It’s far too boring. Oh well.

(The cover design, though: well done.)