How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

How to Invent Everything is such a cool book. It's essential reading for anyone who needs to duplicate an industrial civilization quickly. -Randall Munroe, xkcd creator and New York Times-bestselling author of What If? \n\nThe only book you need if you're going back in time\n\nWhat would you do if a time machine hurled you thousands of years into the past. . . and then broke? How would you survive? Could you improve on humanity's original timeline? And how hard would it be to domesticate a giant wombat? \n\nWith this book as your guide, you'll survive-and thrive-in any period in Earth's history. Bestselling author and time-travel enthusiast Ryan North shows you how to invent all the modern conveniences we take for granted-from first principles. This illustrated manual contains all the science, engineering, art, philosophy, facts, and figures required for even the most clueless time traveler to build a civilization from the ground up. Deeply researched, irreverent, and significantly more fun than being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger, How to Invent Everything will make you smarter, more competent, and completely prepared to become the most important and influential person ever. You're about to make history. . . better.\n\nEditorial Reviews\n\nTechnically, we are all time travelers and we are all trapped. So, even if you happen to be scanning this blurb in what you perceive to be a 'normal' timeline, I heartily recommend you read this book cover to cover." --Zach Weinersmith, creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and author of Soonish \n\n"Brilliant conceit. . . . a slyly funny piece of popular science writing." --Glen Weldon, NPR's Great Reads of 2018 \n\n"Hilarious and endlessly fascinating . . . For the vast general population that might decide to trust their lives to the FC3000, this book is potentially invaluable (and mighty entertaining) one-stop-shop for everything you need to know about life, the universe, and the fly wheel." --Christian Science Monitor \n\n"Ryan North's latest is a handy guide for what to do if you get stuck in the Stone Age...The manual stands well on its own, even if you'll never set foot in a time machine." --Popular Mechanics \n\n"An entertaining and informative survey of Big History . . . worth holding on to even if we never do figure out time travel." --Toronto Star \n\n"A hilarious and practical guide." --Atlas Obscura \n\n"The scale of How to Invent Everything is downright encyclopedic, and the voice, on every page, bubbles with humor. Reading it brought me back to all the afternoons I'd spent as a kid flipping through the big reference books in my local library, and then eagerly running home to tell anyone who'd listen what I'd learned. One of this book's great achievements is the way it so gracefully combines scholarly rigor with youthful wonder." --Electric Literature \n\n"How to Invent Everything is a genuinely entertaining bit of pop science writing, a brief history of human civilization with a wicked sense of humor and sci-fi set-up that make it as fun as it is informative. It's an essential read for would-be time travelers as well as anyone who really wants to know all the various uses for an alpaca." --Barnes & Noble Blog \n\n"I recommend this to any time traveler or world builder who is in the market for a fresh civilization. This is certainly one of those 'better to have and not need rather than need and not have' books, folks. So run out and grab this." --Geeks of Doom \n\n"A must-read for any potential time traveler." --Unbound Worlds \n\n"Stranded in a past century? Not to worry! Here's the entertaining and sometimes even hilarious book that will tell you everything you need to know." - Christian Science Monitor \n"A dazzling piece of work that's also genuinely hilarious." --Elan Mastai, author of All Our Wrong Todays \n\n"A witty pop science guide intended for those demanding times when one needs to create a civilization from scratch... wry humor keeps the discussion lighthearted. North's 'survival guide' is a fun, thoughtful, and thoroughly accessible reference for curious readers, students, and world-builders, as well as wayward time travelers." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) \n\n"Packed with cool, fun, and useful stuff... a friendly and thought-provoking reference, just the thing for the bright kid in the family, to say nothing of the neighborhood time traveler." --Kirkus Reviews\n- From the Publisher\n\n*07/09/2018\nNorth (Romeo and/or Juliet) presents a witty pop science guide intended for those demanding times when one needs to create a civilization from scratch. Framed as a manual for a time traveler, the illustrated narrative begins with a series of questions in flowchart-form to help users figure out where in time they've landed: Are there plants? Are there dinosaurs? Has the Big Bang happened yet? If the traveler in question is lucky enough to have landed some 200,000 years ago, North cheerfully announces, "you could actually be the most influential person in history." Start by introducing the basics, five technologies fundamental to civilization: spoken and written language, "non-sucky" numbers (more than tally marks, and preferably including fractions and zero), the scientific method, and a calorie surplus, via agriculture and domesticating animals. The last is important, North explains, for those who don't want to spend all their time hunting and gathering food. "Civilization Pro Tips" sidebars sprinkled throughout dispense additional suggestions ("Don't forget to plant your legumes"), and wry humor keeps the discussion lighthearted. North's "survival guide" is a fun, thoughtful, and thoroughly accessible reference for curious readers, students, and world-builders, as well as wayward time travelers. (Sept.)\n- Publishers Weekly\n\n2018-06-27\nYou've got a time machine. Now what? This good-natured, sharp user's manual has plenty of solid suggestions for building a world that works."The FC3000 is the most reliable time machine on the rental market today," coos the narrator--in robotic voice, one assumes--of North's (Romeo and/or Juliet: A Chooseable-Path Adventure, 2016, etc.) latest, apparently geared to teenagers but at times a challenge for even the tech-savviest of grown-up nerds. That voice ought to remind you of HAL in 2001, since the time machine rebels, or at least refuses to function, leaving the traveler stranded in some ugly time of history needing a quick technological fix. Let's say, for instance, that you land in a world innocent of charcoal, "the most useful substance you can make out of some wood and a hole in the ground." Now, why would charcoal be an improvement for humankind? Because, among other things, it renders water safe to drink. North goes on to explain the whys and wherefores of oxygen, the terrestrial atmosphere, the science of dry distillation, and other wonkiness before getting into the actual making of charcoal, by which time readers will have attained the sense that it was a momentous invention when charcoal occurred to someone all those years ago. Just so with watermills and windmills, the printing press, logic gates, and other hallmarks of civilization, some of them the kinds of things you didn't know you needed until after the fact and indispensable thereafter. North's book isn't quite as information-rich--or as apocalyptic--as Lewis Dartnell's The Knowledge (2014), but it's a kindred spirit, packed with cool, fun, and useful stuff such as the makings of a rehydration drink rich in electrolytes, "which is of course just the sciency-sounding way to say there's salt in it."A friendly and thought-provoking reference, just the thing for the bright kid in the family, to say nothing of the neighborhood time traveler.\n- Kirkus Reviews