Time Travel in Science Fiction: A Brief History | James Gleick | Big Think

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.

[deepakkpradhan]

In Hindu mythology: one king traveled(instant traveling) to realm of gods to fight a war but he was tricked by the king of gods(Indra) as he was not told time runs slow in that realm thus when he came back after a few days of war all was gone, his kingdom, everything he knew has changed, everything except his family who were with him the whole time he dint understand what is going on, and went to realm of Brahma. Brahma took a couple of minutes(in his realm) to explain him what had happened and told in his realm time runs even slower and he reappears on earth hundreds of years have passed, and and his daughter marries the Krishna’s brother. There are various version of this story each essentially similar to time dilation.

[wellesradio]

It wasn't only time machines, but machines in general that weren't thought of in the same way until the Victorian era, or rather, until the industrial revolution.

[yabbadabbindude]

first concept of time travel was the first person who was resentful or regretful of something that transpired and wished they could relive and alter a key moment.

[yeyintmoe]

if time travel is possible, where are the tourist from the future?

Stephen Hawking

[ArdentRage]

Wells was a time traveler. Introduced the idea of time travel as a paradox.

[-cosmicrogue-]

Nope, Mark Twain beat HG Wells by six years.

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur`s Court: 1889

[alexanderhilerio]

Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward (1888), Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Two examples that predate The Time Machine by 7 and 6 years respectively. Not that I believe James Gleick is entirely wrong; the period did lend itself to introspection of society and how it stood from where it came from (traveling backwards) and where it might be going (traveling forwards). H.G. Well's just was not the only one at the time using time Travel in narrative fiction.

[NextGenAge]

Time travel doesn't exist, we are always in the now. We haven't ever been in the past or the future, only thinking about in the now. When you time travel to "the future" you are still in the same moment so from that perspective we cannot ever escape from being in the "now".

[FourthRoot]

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, 1843. A very popular story about time travel predating the time machine by 52 years. Granted Scrooge was unable to interact with the visions but the way in which this was explained to him in the novel clearly indicates that Dickens considered the idea but likely chose a vision based plot to avoid paradoxes and to keep the plot as plausibly realistic.

[dominichazell]

In the book, the Time Traveller was able to go back in time. He went back from the future he visited in 802701.

[ThePariot]

This reminds me of another similar idea, the emergence of the concept of space travel and astronomy. That people, for the longest time, did not grasp the context for the Earth co-existing with other planets in the same physical space.

[candiduscorvus]

This guy needs to do better research. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Clock That Went Backward, and Memoirs of the Twentieth Century were all years before H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine.

His point stands that time travel in fiction is a relatively new idea, but The Time Machine is not the first.

[immaculateorganicsoaps]

In the Time Machine, he did travel to the past to stop his fiance's death. He realized he could not change the past which is why he went to the future.

[SorceressOfTheFake]

Your link for the transcript is not functional. Is there a way to fix this?

[yinYangMountain]

What! The entire story, ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ (Mark Twain), and written prior to H G Wells’ time travel idea, was about time travel.

[copactic]

i was just a couple of days ago wondering when this concept was "invented".
so this is a most welcome video.

[simonbode]

In 1733 Samuel Madden wrote a novel about a guardian angel who travels back to the year 1728, with letters from 1997 and 1998. Entitled "Memoirs of the Twentieth Century".

[ecoroom]

Some ancient texts depict a character skipping forward in time. In Hindu historical texts, the Vishnu Purana mentions the story of King Raivata Kakudmi, who travels to heaven to meet the creator Brahma and is surprised to learn when he returns to Earth that many ages have passed. The Buddhist Pāli Canon mentions the relativity of time. The Payasi Sutta tells of one of the Buddha's chief disciples, Kumara Kassapa, who explains to the skeptic Payasi that time in the Heavens passes differently than on Earth.

[markbravaco]

This is really cool. Thanks for sharing!

[jones]

The BBC investigated the literary roots of time travel:

It mentions:

Edward Page Mitchell's story The Clock That Went Backward (1881)
Enrique Gaspar's El Anacronopete (1887)
HG Wells' The Time Machine (1894)

Altough Mitchell's story doesn't have much time travel, while Gaspar's very clearly does.