Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Time Travel: A History
    Unavailable
    Time Travel: A History
    Unavailable
    Time Travel: A History
    Audiobook10 hours

    Time Travel: A History

    Written by James Gleick

    Narrated by Rob Shapiro

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 27, 2016
    ISBN9780735285897
    Unavailable
    Time Travel: A History
    Author

    James Gleick

    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.

    More audiobooks from James Gleick

    Related to Time Travel

    Related audiobooks

    Science & Mathematics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Five Short Stories About the Life and Times of Ideas: A complexity theorist explores how science and culture co-evolve.

      Apr 30, 2015

      In the following five short chapters, David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist, and president elect of the Santa Fe Institute, haven of complex systems research, examines five facets of chain reactions, each typifying how ideas spread through science

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Multiverse As Muse

      May 11, 2017

      In his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges describes a present that can, at any moment, bifurcate into different futures—an endless labyrinth of worlds. Taken together they form, he writes, “an infinite

      6 min read

    • Article

      Seeing The Big Picture

      May 26, 2022

      IBN KHALDUN (1332-1406) WAS A PIONEERING Arab scholar and one of the most important historians of the Middle Ages. He is best known for his three-volume masterwork the Muqaddimah, written in 1377, which integrated politics, sociology, economics, demo

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Book No One Read: Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention.

      Oct 2, 2014

      I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress was shaken. It was in 2007, on a warm September evening in San Francisco, where I was relaxing in a cheap motel roo

      11 min read

    • Article

      Big Questions, Muddled Answers

      Oct 28, 2021

      Human The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking Michael Bhaskar (Hachette, £20) Kit Wilson is a London-based writer AFTER CENTURIES OF acceleration, humanity is stuck. Genuinely world changing innovations — the aeroplane, vaccines, electric

      4 min read

    • Article

      Trending Science Fiction

      Oct 27, 2022

      A new exhibition. Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination - running at London's Science Museum until 4 May - explores the genre's evolution and power to predict the future. We spoke to one of its contributors, Roger Luckhurst. Sci-fi is ab

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Dunne experiment

      Oct 29, 2018

      The Dunne experiment
      4 min read

    • Article

      Haunted by His Brother, He Revolutionized Physics: To John Archibald Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal.

      Jan 16, 2014

      T he postcard contained only two words: “Hurry up.” John Archibald Wheeler, a 33-year-old physicist, was in Hanford, Wash., working on the nuclear reactor that was feeding plutonium to Los Alamos, when he received the postcard from his younger brothe

      13 min read

    • Article

      Haunted by His Brother, He Revolutionized Physics

      Nov 8, 2018

      T he postcard contained only two words: “Hurry up.” John Archibald Wheeler, a 33-year-old physicist, was in Hanford, Wash., working on the nuclear reactor that was feeding plutonium to Los Alamos, when he received the postcard from his younger brothe

      13 min read

    • Article

      Haunted by His Brother, He Revolutionized Physics

      Nov 8, 2018

      T he postcard contained only two words: “Hurry up.” John Archibald Wheeler, a 33-year-old physicist, was in Hanford, Wash., working on the nuclear reactor that was feeding plutonium to Los Alamos, when he received the postcard from his younger brothe

      13 min read

    • Article

      Human History Gets a Rewrite

      Oct 18, 2021

      Human History Gets a Rewrite
      9 min read

    • Article

      The End Of The End Of History

      Sep 25, 2023

      The End Of The End Of History
      5 min read

    • Article

      This Tenet Shows Time Travel May Be Possible

      Mar 24, 2021

      Time travel has been a beloved science-fiction idea at least since H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895. The concept continues to fascinate and fictional approaches keep coming, prodding us to wonder whether time travel is physically possible an

      7 min read

    • Article

      Creative AIs Depend on Creative Humans

      Jan 17, 2024

      From the day humans first began recording our stories, one thing has remained consistent: The form evolves. Innovations like paper, the printing press, and the internet have transformed how we document and distribute our literary endeavors, inspiring

      3 min read

    • Article

      Voyages Through Time

      Nov 4, 2022

      Voyages Through Time
      5 min read

    • Article

      Hitler’s Forgotten Victims

      May 11, 2023

      Hitler’s Forgotten Victims
      7 min read

    • Article

      Harnessing Ancient Sensitivity

      Dec 1, 2022

      Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness Charles Foster Profile Books 2022 Pb, 400pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781788167185 Charles Foster’s first best-seller – Being a Beast (2016), widely praised as a “strange masterpiece” – had a premise that was hard to

      11 min read

    • Article

      Why Physicists Make Up Stories in the Dark: In unseen worlds, science invariably crosses paths with fantasy.

      Mar 6, 2014

      For centuries, scientists studied light to comprehend the visible world. Why are things colored? What is a rainbow? How do our eyes work? And what is light itself? These are questions that preoccupied scientists and philosophers since the time of Ari

      15 min read

    • Article

      What’s the Story?

      Mar 27, 2018

      OF THE MORE THAN one dozen books I have researched and written, the project that made the biggest impact on me, personally, took place over a six-year period beginning in the mid-1980s, during which I immersed myself in the world’s largest organ tran

      4 min read

    • Article

      Who Said Science and Art Were Two Cultures?

      Nov 17, 2021

      On a May evening in 1959, C.P. Snow, a popular novelist and former research scientist, gave a lecture before a gathering of dons and students at the University of Cambridge, his alma mater. He called his talk “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revo

      8 min read

    • Article

      Edgar Allan Poe’s Other Obsession

      Jun 11, 2021

      This article was published online on June 11, 2021. In the early and macabre days of coronavirus shutdowns, Edgar Allan Poe was trending. “The Masque of the Red Death,” his Gothic tale from 1842, became in March of 2020 a go-to source for allegory: A

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Universe Of The Waiting Room

      Dec 2, 2021

      (non)Fiction, serialized by novelist Jung Jidon. When we talk about space, we swiftly discover is that we know nothing about it. This article is a hypothetical non-fiction work that explores how the opportunities afforded by space exist in different

      5 min read

    Reviews for Time Travel

    3.5/5

    79 ratings16 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      A readable and entertaining overview of the idea of time travel since Wells. Not as well-formed or complete as could be hoped for but passably researched. Would have preferred clearer structure and fully formed theses. Interesting ideas about the relationship between fiction, metaphor, and science as well as non-linear time in literature. Pretty good on the subject, if you are interested.
    • 4/5
      Very well done. A history of the history of time travel, so to speak, in that Time Travel itself doesn't exist (yet?) but that hasn't stopped many of our best authors from writing about it, nonetheless. As much a book for literary enthusiasts and SF fans as devotees of science, as the author goes back and forth between literature and physics.

      And it's a lovely, beautifully-written volume. Very recommended. Lacks 5 stars because it didn't make me cry, and I'm unlikely to read it again, but there's nothing wrong with it.

      (Note: 5 stars = rare and amazing, 4 = very good book, 3 = a decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. There are a lot of 4s and 3s in the world!)
    • 3/5
      The book's title has two meanings. The first is obvous, time travel at other than the normal rate. The other is traveling through history discussing attitudes and knowledge about time. The first few chapters discuss historical perspectives about time, putting them in context of the local cultures. Then it gets into fiction, early suggestions of time travel cluminating with H. G. Wells and the actual consideration of traveling through time.With Wells' book, there is a lot of discussion about reactions to the idea, from supportive and expansive fiction to ridiculing reactions as reviews. It expands on this idea to talk about how time travel is used to tell stories. This includes backstories and telling a story from two differnt time periods concurrently, as opposed to the current idea of time travel. Finally, there is some discussion about the arrow of time, current ideas on time travel, and more journeys into fiction. The book is interesting and worth reading, but didn't provide a lot of new information of philosophical ideas.
    • 4/5
      I would say it assumes some familiarity with the science fiction literature of time travel, which it discusses in depth.Has major spoilers (gives away the ending) for Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity.Unabridged audiobook:Well read by Rob Shapiro. The powerful conclusion of the ending is unfortunately stepped on, as we get only four seconds -- four seconds! -- between the ending and the narrator stepping in to give concluding credits. The concluding credits should have been separated much farther in time and in space, by having a longer quiet space at the end of the last chapter, and by separating the credits into a subsequent track. Stop the playback at 30 seconds remaining if you want to savour the ending.
    • 3/5
      Very interesting and entertaining book.
      The best parts are when he tells us how authors and tv shows have used the concept of time travel to tell stories.
      When he gets into the physics of time travel I got completely lost on more than one occasion. It will make your head spin - and hurt, to try to completely understand the paradoxes of time travel.
      That did not dampen my enjoyment of the book.
      Think of this as an Erik Larsen type history book. Instead of World's Fairs and sinking ships, the really fun subject of traveling through time.
    • 3/5
      Really didn't care for it - just never got hooked. I'm a big fan of Gleick, but this book just didn't have the usual effect. Too bad, I was excited when I heard about it coming out.
    • 4/5
      Can we travel through time? Well, sure. We're doing it now at a rate of one minute per minute. But can we change our speed or turn around and go back the other way, and, if so, what are the implications? Time travel in this way is a fairly new idea, and in this book, James Gleick provides an entertaining survey of it in fiction, philosophy, and physics. I found it quite entertaining.
    • 3/5
      A pretty basic, mostly literary treatment of time travel, with a few "science"-y bits thrown in. A perfectly fine quick read, but it definitely didn't knock my socks off.
    • 5/5
      Extremely thought provoking and inspiring. Read it if you dare!
    • 3/5
      A very thought provoking book. Mr Gleik is quite well read, and exhibits a wide ranging analysis of the idea dwelling in both the Sci-Fi world and that of more formal philosophy, and to some degree, physics. The wide-ranging bibliography contains TV scripts, the cinema, and actual books, by terry Gillam, T.S. Elliot, and of course the originator H.G. Wells. It does bring more examples, counter-arguments, and insights than one might be comfortable with. It does read well. And, one finds in it this interesting definition: "What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track."
    • 3/5
      My favorite parts were about the SF classics, Pulps and HG Wells, next up for me to read By His Bootstraps by Robert A. Heinlein, Gleick devotes a chapter to this SF classic. Then I'd like to find a biography of HG Wells.
    • 4/5
      A detailed history of the development of the concept of time travel - a relatively modern idea. This book primarily explores literature, film and pop culture but does also delve into physics, mathematics, and various high science theory as well as philosophy. Definitely there were chapters that I mostly didn't understand. But the rest were very instructive and fascinating. I love anything to do with time travel, and it's true that as a concept it has fairly completely permeated out culture. I enjoyed examining its development and growth and the various tropes that inform it.
    • 3/5
      Kept me reading despite being just an analysis of usage of the time travel concept in books and film. Goes into too much detail of every example, recapping the plots for no benefit.
    • 4/5
      While this didn't go as deep into the science and stuck more with the literary and cultural aspects of the history of time travel, I still found Gleick's conversational style good enough to keep me interested from start to finish.
    • 3/5
      Time Travel: A History mixes the history of time travel as a science fiction genre, with the physics on the possibility of time travel, and the philosophy of how time travel stories has affected our way of thinking. I enjoyed the book, though I would have liked more analysis and examination of the many different stories that make up the genre, from stories, film, and TV. Gleick covers many of the stories you would expect him to, and a few I was unaware of, though he did limited examination of time travel in movies and TV. (Just barely touching on a few of the different titles in this varied genre.) I did find the discussion well thought out and insightful. Well worth the read for anybody interested in diving behind just the books and stories.
    • 3/5
      James Gleick’s newest book, Time Travel, was a bit of a disappointment to me. Gleick is an excellent explicator of abstruse subjects (Cf. Chaos and The Information), so I expected a lucid explication of bizarre relativity physics dealing with the nature of time. Instead, Gleick pretty much dismisses the possibility of time travel. He states that, as imagined by writers over the decades, it “does not exist. It cannot.”So what is there to write about? Culture: how time travel has been expressed in various forms of media, and the philosophical hopes and dreams behind its enduring appeal, e.g., the desire to continue to exist beyond the years of our allotted lifespan. As he says at the end of the book: “Why do we need time travel? All the answers come down to one. To elude death.”For most of the book, Gleick describes how various authors, beginning with H. G. Wells and his Time Machine, have explored the potentialities and paradoxes of time travel. His analysis of the literature is enlightening, but will mean more to those familiar with all the works he discusses. Evaluation: Since I am more interested in science than in science fiction, my disappointment in the book may not be a fair reaction; fans of time travel in books and on television will no doubt love this overview of how the subject evolved “over time.” A Few Notes on the Audio Production:I listened to the book, read by Rob Shapiro. Although he does a fine job reading, the problem with the audio version is that the organization or outline of the book is not at all obvious, and it seems to skip from one topic or aspect to another somewhat randomly. I’m sure the structure of the argument would have been easier to perceive in print, but I was never sure where the author was going as I listened in the car. In avoiding the printed medium I may have done a disservice to an author I respect and have enjoyed in the past. (JAB)