Our story begins at the turn of the previous century, with young Herbert George Wells writing his first book - a fantastic story that shook the world - titled "The Time Machine".

At that time, a multitude of factors - philosophical and technological - contributed to a radical change in our perception of Time. Progress was unstoppable - the electric telegraph, steam engines and railways, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks - and this was good for the optimist of technology.

Circular Time, its paradoxes and crossroads, eternal return, the "wheel" of life... were simply romantic ideas, suitable for poets and nostalgic philosophers. Even for mathematicians and physicists, time travel was a harmless "fantasy", until Kurt Gödel showed Albert Einstein that the equations of relativity allowed for solutions in which time travel seemed possible - although no one knew exactly how.

James Gleick traces the evolution of time travel as an idea that became an integral part of modern culture - from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who and from Jorge Luis Borges to Woody Allen.