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krpalmerHappening to see a comment about a book called “How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler” did amuse me. After glancing into a copy at a bookstore, I wound up asking for a copy for my birthday. Not expecting to travel back in time, much less wind up stranded in the past, I suppose that even as I accepted on some level the book’s framing conceit I was also ready to see it as “a brief primer on science and technology,” similar in some fashion to the “tech trees” of the Civilization computer games. Still, from my first glance into the book I’d been mulling over its particular time travel model, which used a now-familiar idea that “changing history creates an alternative universe” (thus avoiding accusations of “paradox”) but let its time machine (assuming it’s still working) bring you back to the unchanged universe you started from. As if to keep things from getting too comfortable, though, I also took some interest in a flowchart that narrowed down just when you’re stranded. It did remind me of my impression “the twentieth-century Doctor Who series” often had the TARDIS simply unable to be directed to a desired destination, although I’m not familiar with the entirety of the show then.
Moving on from “particularities of science fiction” to “actual technology,” I started picking up on the simplicity of the first techniques described and how long they took to be invented and adopted in reality, all the way back to language itself. The book argues that the “behavioural modernity” linked with language had left evidence in fits and starts before becoming established, an interesting idea to contemplate even if I’d like to see second opinions on that. All of it was eased along by a generally smart-aleck tone; I admit I got to wondering about about the people praising Ryan North’s work on the back of the dust jacket (with its note about how to identify the less dangerous dinosaurs should you be stranded over sixty-five million years before the present) as representing the “fanboy-industrial complex” I have unfortunate problems with.
Still, the book did seem positive; in the course of its whistle-stop tour I could imagine a stranded time traveler building a civilization from scratch powered by willow charcoal and making heavy use of bicycles while navigating with the help of radio broadcasts. I suppose I did start wondering about “statecraft”; the deepest source of wisdom seemed “Major Schools of Philosophy Summed Up in a Few Quippy Sentences About High-Fives” even if I could wonder about “basic hygiene doing more for humanity than idle philosophizing ever did.” At the very least the book didn’t include a recipe for gunpowder or anything similar, although its section on birth control, in bringing up a North African plant the Romans ate to extinction that reminded me it had been mentioned in a science fiction novel I read not that long ago, had me making a cursory further search only to be reminded that if every folk medicine did something rhinos and tigers wouldn’t be being poached for nothing.
Moving on from “particularities of science fiction” to “actual technology,” I started picking up on the simplicity of the first techniques described and how long they took to be invented and adopted in reality, all the way back to language itself. The book argues that the “behavioural modernity” linked with language had left evidence in fits and starts before becoming established, an interesting idea to contemplate even if I’d like to see second opinions on that. All of it was eased along by a generally smart-aleck tone; I admit I got to wondering about about the people praising Ryan North’s work on the back of the dust jacket (with its note about how to identify the less dangerous dinosaurs should you be stranded over sixty-five million years before the present) as representing the “fanboy-industrial complex” I have unfortunate problems with.
Still, the book did seem positive; in the course of its whistle-stop tour I could imagine a stranded time traveler building a civilization from scratch powered by willow charcoal and making heavy use of bicycles while navigating with the help of radio broadcasts. I suppose I did start wondering about “statecraft”; the deepest source of wisdom seemed “Major Schools of Philosophy Summed Up in a Few Quippy Sentences About High-Fives” even if I could wonder about “basic hygiene doing more for humanity than idle philosophizing ever did.” At the very least the book didn’t include a recipe for gunpowder or anything similar, although its section on birth control, in bringing up a North African plant the Romans ate to extinction that reminded me it had been mentioned in a science fiction novel I read not that long ago, had me making a cursory further search only to be reminded that if every folk medicine did something rhinos and tigers wouldn’t be being poached for nothing.