Time Travel in Science Fiction: A Brief History
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The idea of time travel, so familiar to us now, was unheard-of before H.G. Wells's 1895 book The Time Machine. Since then, notions of time travel have blossomed in fascinating ways.The idea of progress — technological and moral — is inescapably familiar to us. For anyone born after the invention of the steam engine in the early 1700s, a steady series of mechanical and social changes (from the train and telegraph to the American and French revolutions) imbued each person with a sense of inexorable advancement. And it is these kinds of changes, James Gleick argues in his new book Time Travel: A History, that gave us the idea that we could literally travel to the future.
Humans have long prepared for the future (by storing grain for the winter, etc.), aware that we are gradually moving into it. The ability to make plans for different potential futures is partly what distinguishes us from other animals, but the idea of moving actively into a distant present — going forward a number of years in an instant — all begins with one book: H.G. Wells's The Time Machine.
Published in 1895, it proved a work of such imagination as to inspire all subsequent time travel stories, says Gleick. Before The Time Machine, there is simply no record of us thinking we might travel into the future at a faster pace than what occurs naturally. Without evidence of technological and social progress, there was simply no reason to think that the future would be different from the present in any substantial way.
Read any book set in the future, or watch any sci-fi film that imagines the future. There are always imaginative technological changes to account for, as well as social differences. More frequently than not, they are imagined as dystopias: Brave New World, 1984, Bladerunner, AI, etc. But the original account of a society drastically different from its own — Thomas Moore's Utopia, published in 1516 before the Enlightenment's myriad advances — is not located in the future. It is located on a faraway island, so far that is is impossible to reach, at least presently.
It is fascinating that just ten years after Wells's The Time Machine is published, Einstein publishes his theory of special relativity, beginning a paradigm shift that provides mathematical justification for the fanciful notion of time travel. Wells's book had no influence on Einstein, but it speaks to the power of the imagination that fictional ideas, like that of a time machine, can presage fundamental changes in how we view reality.
James Gleick's most recent book is Time Travel: A History.
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JAMES GLEICK :
James Gleick was born in New York City in 1954. He graduated from Harvard College in 1976 and helped found Metropolis, an alternative weekly newspaper in Minneapolis. Then he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter for The New York Times.
His first book, Chaos, was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist and a national bestseller. He collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. His next books include the best-selling biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, both shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Faster and What Just Happened. They have been translated into twenty-five languages.
In 1989-90 he was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University. For some years he wrote the Fast Forward column in the New York Times Magazine.
With Uday Ivatury, he founded The Pipeline, a pioneering New York City-based Internet service in 1993, and was its chairman and chief executive officer until 1995. He was the first editor of the Best American Science Writing series. He is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.
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TRANSCRIPT :
James Gleick: If there was one startling fact that got me going on this book it was realizing that time travel is a new idea. We're so familiar with it. We grow up with time travel. We have time travel in cartoons. We know all of the jokes. We know the paradoxes. It's like part of the fabric of our culture. And it was really a surprise to me to discover that before H.G. Wells there was almost no conception of time travel. Nobody put the two words together. Time Machine, his 1895 book is really the first time people thought there could be such a thing as a time machine and that just struck me as weird.
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