Good, where to start? The reader has parts from the beginning, middle, and end of the book that stand out; out of order out of….TIME! 
Time Travel is a curiosity of a non-fiction book. It’s almost literary in in its non-fiction meanderings. Explore science fiction, pop culture, physics, psychology, religion, cyberpunk, social media. It’s all here as Gleick tries to make sense of what we mean we talk about time and time travel. Over and over (a time loop) he quotes various experts in philosophy, religion, and literature saying we know what time is until we try to explain it, and then we lose it.
Time travel itself is a largely new idea, he argues. In most of our past we have either been to busy to worry about such things or we have only debated what time is with various persistent metaphors (a river, a stream, a chain). Although, various minds have wondered whether we were only ever in the present – whether the present was all we have.
Gleick hits on HG Wells’ Time Machine as opening up various stream and forks of thought (those words again). Can we go back in time? If so, how and what would the consequences be? Can we go to the future? Don’t we always? Is the free will/determinism argument just a silly way of looking at an uncertain future and realizing its awayness is no different than that of the past – what’s done is done, whether then or now (whose then or now)?
There’s Proust, of course, and Marty McFly – going back in time together.
Finally – why don’t we care about the future as much? My theory is because we expect it to be bleak? Have things gotten better on Earth in the last 80 years? Gleik explore how technology has made the present so vast and amorphous and quick – who can worry about the future when we can’t grasp the present? Maybe it’s as simple as regret – we look back because we miss something – we want certain feelings or people or “times” more than what we have now.
What a curious book.
