How To Invent Everything review

How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, by Ryan North, is a fun book. The basic premise is that this is a guide for rebuilding civilization from scratch, if you should find yourself stranded in the past with nothing but this book.

More specifically, the conceit of the entire book is that it’s actually a guide for a stranded time traveler, and all of us reading the book in the 21st century aren’t really its intended target audience. In the introductory “note to readers”, the real author, Ryan North, claims to have discovered a copy of the text embedded in bedrock billions of years old, where it was presumably left by a real time traveler (who, being stranded on a very early Earth, would sadly have had little opportunity to make use of the guide); the bulk of the book (everything except said introductory note and the endnotes and index) was supposedly written by a fictional author (coincidentally also named Ryan North), who lives in a future version of our own world which possesses time travel technology.

I confess that at first I found this irritating. Why am I being asked, I thought, to believe (or suspend disbelief for) this ridiculous and pointless framing device? But as I kept reading, I came to appreciate it, and understood that it’s not pointless at all. By writing from the perspective of a fictional future author from a society with access to time machines, the real author gets to state all sorts of things with confidence which in reality we can only surmise or guess at, and then slap on an endnote along the lines of “my research has around two thousand years’ wiggle room on the date” or “all the research I found suggests the date here is at best an educated guess”. (And occasionally the fictional author can just directly describe a fun “temporal experiment” and leave it to the endnotes to point out that obviously we can’t really know what would happen if you dropped a functional wooden glider in Europe in 1000 CE.) This greatly streamlines the text and makes for a book that’s simply more fun to read.

The actual guide part of the book is consistently interesting and entertaining. The explanations or instructions are often by necessity somewhat terse – it took me a while to understand what the point of the Bessemer process is, and I’m still not sure how the various parts of a spinning wheel work without running into each other – but the writing style generally leaves me with the impression that I’d be able to figure things out somehow, and eager to try it out.

A recurring theme of the book is how embarrassing the actual course of history and technological development is for humanity as a whole. This most often refers to the sheer amount of time humans needed to figure things out when they had all the necessary prerequisites (five fundamental technologies, all of which could have been invented at any point in humanity’s history, are described in “a table any human should be embarrassed to even be in the same room with”; on “non-sucky numbers”, the author remarks that “Homo sapiens sapiens, a species that considers itself so smart that it put ‘smart’ in its own name, twice, and in Latin, took more than 40,000 years to figure [them] out”), but also to various inventors’ incorrect understanding of their inventions (on heavier-than-air flight: “for decades, every single person who flew managed to do so without having a correct understanding of how and why their planes really worked”). This makes for an amusing text (unless you want to get offended on the dead people’s behalf, I suppose) and also helps to reinforce the impression that, if you were trapped in the past with no supporting technology except this book, you would be able to reinvent everything much faster than we managed in our real timeline.

This also makes for an (I think) interesting comparison with the Civilization games – when I first read the book, this wasn’t on my mind because it had been years since I’d played any, but on my more recent reread (having played a bunch of Civ6 in the meantime) I started to think about it. There are some superficial similarities between the two: both like to introduce technologies with vaguely related quotations, for example, and both feature a tech tree (Appendix A in the book). But the overall goal is quite different. The Civ tech tree is carefully balanced on gameplay grounds, and the game tries to approximate the course of civilization development in our actual history. Flight, for instance, has 21 prerequisite technologies (from animal husbandry to industrialization), and no matter what you do, you’re not going to get it much earlier than the modern era. How To Invent Everything, on the other hand, delights in pointing out that lighter-than-air flight (i.e., hot-air balloons) requires nothing other than fabric and fire and could have been invented thousands of years ago, if only humans hadn’t been so insistent in trying to copy birds. In some cases, the book completely skips over a technological development in our timeline in favor of an alternative solution that is both simpler and better – for example, instead of teaching you how to invent (massively complicated) marine chronometers, it offers a totally different solution to the longitude problem (which I’m not going to spoil here 😛).

With all that said, I want to turn to my one major issue with the book. As you may have gathered at this point, the book has a focus on technology: there are sections on other subjects, such as nutrition (section 9), medicine (section 14), music (section 16), and a minimum of lip service is even paid to philosophy (section 12), but the bulk of the book is taken up by section 10, which lists various technologies, their prerequisites, and how to invent them ahead of schedule. For a popular science book aimed at geeks in the present day, this is totally fine and sensible.

However, if you take the book’s conceit seriously, and actually consider it as a manual for rebuilding civilization from scratch, then I think the implications of this are frankly terrifying. The book takes pride in being, on account of all the knowledge inside it, “the most dangerous item on the planet” (section 3.2), and yet its approach to managing that danger, and ensuring that the knowledge is not misused, amounts to simply assuming that the reader is a decent person and hoping that this will result in a decent society with no major problems. For instance, in section 10.12.1, the author asserts that the reader “[won’t] have to labor under the hangover of thousands of years of patriarchy”; even if you assume that the reader didn’t end up in a time period with an existing patriarchal society (despite this being considered a possibility elsewhere in the book), it strikes me as bold to assume that the reader won’t have any biases of their own, conscious or otherwise.

Topics which the book feels no need to even mention include: human rights and civil rights; democracy, representative democracy, and elected rather than hereditary heads of state (is this too much to ask of a Canadian author?); how to run democratic elections (universal and equal suffrage, secret ballots, the right to stand for office, etc.); constitutions, separation of powers, separation of church and state; the rule of law, the state monopoly on violence, basic legal principles like the right to counsel; why corporal punishment or the death penalty are bad ideas; the paradox of tolerance.

I can think of some reasons not to include these things in the book, but none of them convince me. Sure, there’s limited space available, but surely a summary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be more valuable than three full pages of frequencies for musical notes (Appendix G). Some of these things might seem obvious, but the book doesn’t otherwise shy away from repeating obvious things (if only to clown on humans for taking such a long time to figure them out anyway) – section 10.8.2 spends a page and a half on the concept of buttons (the clothes kind). And in any case, many of these ideas are far from obvious – they took society centuries and millennia to work out in our timeline. A book which lets the reader “fast forward” through technological progress should aim to put them on at least equal footing in terms of societal progress.

Admittedly, some of these principles are harder to introduce to a civilization than technologies. To introduce glass, you “just” have to invent it and then you can expect that people will see that it’s useful and be interested in making more themselves; to introduce social principles, you have to explain them to people and convince them of them. But this should be all the more reason for a guide to civilization to prepare the reader with this information, so that they can actually try to convince their fellow humans using the arguments from the guide, rather than being left with nothing but a vague feeling of “well I think the society I’m from used to follow this principle but I’m not even sure why let alone how to convince others of it”.

But as I said: this criticism mainly applies within the book’s fictional framework of being an actual guide for real time-travelers. For a reader in the real world, I’m still happy to recommend the book 🙂