Time Travel: A History
James Gleick
Literature, science
As far as anyone can tell, there isn't any history of actual time travel. This book is, accordingly, a history of the idea of time travel. It's fairly light on physics, discursive, playfully written, and enjoyably meandering. What it lacks in mass, it makes up in range. There can't be all that many books out there, for example, that quote T. S. Eliot and Commander Spock within a few pages of one another. (Admittedly the comparison is a bit unfair; Eliot's cultural influence is comparatively minor.) There are some mind-bending asides, some witty aphorisms, some unexpected cultural crossovers. All in all, a fun read.
Much of Time Travel is about the fictions of time travel. In the process, the fictions themselves are described in some detail, which would rather spoil them for anyone who hadn't read them already. Read Asimov's The End of Eternity, Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and "--All You Zombies--", before you read Time Travel.
I've always thought time travel is the most difficult of the SF tropes. 12 Monkeys is the only movie I can think of that did it well, and the Heinlein stories you mention hold a similar place among written fiction (I never liked The End of Eternity -- I would call it his least-good book, not counting the potboilers he wrote in the late eighties to pay his medical bills.)
ReplyDeleteWhereas I think that The End of Eternity is maybe Asimov's best novel, with the only other contender being The Caves of Steel.
DeleteTime Travel the book starts with Wells (naturally), and returns to him many, um, times. It's surprising and impressive how many of the cliches of the subgenre originated in The Time Machine.
The Time Machine is an allegory on the relationship between capital and labor. I believe later writers mined the incidents of the story but not the political content.
DeleteThe Caves of Steel has the great advantage that unlike The End of Eternity it does not contain one of Asimov's embarrassingly bad love scenes.
Yes and no on The Time Machine. There were quite a lot of early writers who followed Wells's lead in the traveller-to-the-future-as-social-critique mode. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward is famous, although basically unreadable. Even Hugo Gernsbeck did it, although he's actually unreadable. One big difference is that a lot of the other writers imagined a future (techocratic) utopia, not a dystopia.
DeleteStarting in the 1920s and thereafter, more and more writers followed Wells's technical cues, but left the social content behind. Which, I suppose, is generally true of pre-Golden-Age and Golden-Age SF.
Re: The Caves of Steel, really the "love scene" content is quite limited. It has a good deal more "obsessed clueless geeky man longing" in it--a sentiment with which I suspect that Asimov was not unfamiliar.