Of all time travel's paradoxes, here's the strangest of them all: hop on a TARDIS back to 1894 and the concept didn't even exist. "Time travel is a new idea," explains New York-based author James Gleick, 62. "It's a very modern myth." Gleick's entertaining Time Travel: A History, out in hardback in February, quantum leaps from HG Wells's The Time Machine - the original - via Proust and alt-history right up to your Twitter timeline. Until we get the DeLorean working for real, fellow travellers, consider it the next best thing.
The Mahabharata
Time travel appears in Hindu text The Mahabharata, and in stories such as Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle (1819) - but it usually only involved a one-way trip. "People fell asleep, and woke up in the future," says Gleick.
HG Wells's The Time Machine
"The idea of time travel with volition, in either direction, didn't arrive until Wells," says Gleick. It explains that time is a dimension - something not widely accepted until Einstein's theories in 1905.
Henri Bergson's Time And Free Will
Bergson's thesis is published soon after Wells's novel. "Bergson is a friend of Marcel Proust," says Gleick. Soon Proust et al are jumping on the idea of time travel to explore free will - and influencing new sci-fi in return.
Time Capsules
The idea of preserving a time stamp only arose in the 1930s in Scientific American. "It's the most pedestrian form of time travel: sending something into the future at a rate of one minute per minute."
Robert A Heinlein's By His Bootstraps
Heinlein's short story, published in Astounding bet365体育赛事 Fiction, introduces the idea of a character appearing in multiple timelines, meeting themselves amid complex - and funny - paradoxes.
William Gibson's The Peripheral
Gleick cites Gibson's unique twist on the genre: "We can't send people, but what if you could send information back to the past?" It's a chilling new take. "It shows how our cultural conception of time is changing."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
