Time Travel. A History

*1 Marshall McLuhan said that in 1962.

*2 “They make me feel sad.” What’s good about feeling sad? “It’s happy for deep people.”

*3 Like David Tennant, to be exact.

*4 “Feels more like working security than a game.”

“Maybe it’s a game about working security.”

*5 “—Must be a spatio-temporal hyperlink.”

“—What’s that?”

“—No idea. Just made it up. Didn’t want to say ‘magic door.’ ”

—Steven Moffat, “The Girl in the Fireplace” (Doctor Who), 2006

*6 Completists will note, however, his 1981 story “The Gernsback Continuum,” a hat tip to Hugo. The story is at least time travelish. Semiotic ghosts. “As I moved among these secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the inhabitants of that lost future would think of the world I lived in.”

*7 Heidegger: “We perceive time only because we know we have to die.”

Acknowledgments

For pointers and discussion I am deeply obliged to David Albert, Lera Boroditsky, Billy Collins, Uta Frith, Chris Fuchs, Rivka Galchen, William Gibson, Janna Levin, Alison Lurie, Daniel Menaker, Maria Popova, Robert D. Richardson, Phyllis Rose, Siobhan Roberts, Lee Smolin, Craig Townsend, and Grant Wythoff, as well as my indefatigable agent, Michael Carlisle, my wise and patient editor, Dan Frank, and, always, Cynthia Crossen.

Sources and Further Reading

These are some of the works on which this one depends.

STORIES

Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland, 1884.

Douglas Adams, “The Pirate Planet” (Doctor Who), 1978.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980.

Woody Allen, Sleeper, 1973.

Midnight in Paris, 2011.

Kingsley Amis, The Alteration, 1976.

Martin Amis, “The Time Disease,” 1987.

Time’s Arrow, 1991.

Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity, 1955.

John Jacob Astor IV, A Journey in Other Worlds, 1894.

Kate Atkinson, Life After Life, 2013.

A God in Ruins, 2014.

Marcel Aymé, “Le décret,” 1943.

John Banville, The Infinities, 2009.

Ancient Light, 2012.

Max Beerbohm, “Enoch Soames,” 1916.

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 1888.

Alfred Bester, “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed,” 1958.

Michael Bishop, No Enemy but Time, 1982.

Jorge Luis Borges, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 1941.

El aleph, 1945.

Nueva refutación del tiempo, 1947.

Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder,” 1952.

Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life,” 1998.

Ray Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom, 1922.

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, 1962.

Counter-Clock World, 1967.

“A Little Something for Us Tempunauts,” 1974.

Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand, 1969.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 1943.

Harlan Ellison, “The City on the Edge of Forever” (Star Trek), 1967.

Ralph Milne Farley, “I Killed Hitler,” 1941.

Jack Finney, “The Face in the Photo,” 1962.

Time and Again, 1970.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” 1922.

E. M. Forster, The Machine Stops, 1909.

Stephen Fry, Making History, 1997.

Rivka Galchen, “The Region of Unlikeness,” 2008.

Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660, 1925.

David Gerrold, The Man Who Folded Himself, 1973.

William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” 1981.

The Peripheral, 2014.

Terry Gilliam, Twelve Monkeys, 1995.

James E. Gunn, “The Reason Is with Us,” 1958.

Robert Harris, Fatherland, 1992.

Robert Heinlein, “Life-Line,” 1939.

“By His Bootstraps,” 1941.

Time for the Stars, 1956.

“ ‘—All You Zombies—,’ ” 1959.

Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle,” 1819.

Henry James, The Sense of the Past, 1917.

Alfred Jarry, “Commentaire pour servir à la construction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps,” 1899.

Rian Johnson, Looper, 2012.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven, 1971.

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, 1994.

Muray Leinster (William Fitzgerald Jenkins), “The Runaway Skyscraper,” 1919.

Stanisław Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, 1961.

The Futurological Congress, 1971.

Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams, 1992.

Samuel Madden, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, 1733.

Chris Marker, La jetée, 1962.

J. McCullough, Golf in the Year 2000; or, What Are We Coming To, 1892.