How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North
This review originally appeared in Volume 68, Number 4, November 2021 issue of Technical Communication.
Time travel is a common and popular theme in both literature and film. From H.G. Wells to Back to the Future, people have imagined how time travel could work and alter their lives, perhaps by travelling to the past to make a sound investment or place a winning bet on a sporting event. However, very few sources center on travelling through time with the intention of inventing everything and explain to you how to do so. Humorist Ryan North, perhaps best known for his Dinosaur Comics, wears the hat of a technical communicator and presents a fun, but serious look at how to re-create the modern world if you are stranded in the past, in How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler.
The book’s framing narrative is that you are a time traveler stranded in the past, reading the time machine repair guide. In the likely event that you cannot fix the time machine, you’ll have to build modern society from scratch, with the guide’s help. While this sounds fantastical in concept, it sets the tone for what is essentially a reference book on discovering everything, from breeding dogs from wolves, to creating charcoal to filter water, to composing “Ode to Joy” with your name on the manuscript.
In the introductions, North credits a technical writer (himself in another timeline) with creating the book’s content. Accordingly, much of the content is relatively technical in nature, although explained so any common person/stranded time traveler can follow along and understand. Each section lists the invention, a relevant quote about it, a description, what people did without it before it was invented, when it was invented, the prerequisites of inventing it, and how to invent it. For example, without inventing glass you would not have corrective lenses or microscopes. To invent it no prerequisite inventions are needed unless you want to make artificial glass. Next, not only instructions on how to create glass are provided, but also how to form glass into useful objects, such as a telescope. Footnotes help flesh out the process and add levity to the content.
After reading How to Invent Everything, you may not be ready to create a combustion engine from scratch, although all types of engines are described. Throughout what could be a dense encyclopedia of information, North sprinkles humorous observations and informative footnotes about actual history, such as the “wandering womb” theory from ancient Greece that persisted until the 1800s. The content reads like a high-level summary of what you would expect to learn in an overview course of just about everything, including basic chemistry to music composition to computer logic and the first 768 digits of pi for reference. For anyone who would like a general explanation of how the modern world works explained at a high school level, invent moveable type and bookbinding, pick up a copy of this book, warm up your flux capacitor, and prepare for a delightful travel through time.
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Timothy Esposito 