Are we trapped in the present, free to move in space yet unable to travel in the fourth dimension? Or is there a chance, a glimmer of a possibility, that the past and future could unfurl to our physical experience at will? Despite the punchline being apparent from the off – lest we forget, such journeys are impossible – James Gleick’s latest offering sets out to question the questions, probing how the idea of time travel emerged, gripped our imaginations and shaped our society.

Our relationship with the slippery concept of time is far from static: technology continues to shape our view, even now

From the start it is apparent who’s the hero of this journey. “One way or another, the inventions of HG Wells colour every time-travel story that followed,” writes Gleick, pointing out that while a smattering of earlier stories explored utopian futures, it was Wells who, with his 1895 work, got to the nuts and bolts of the matter in knocking up a time machine.

It’s easy to forget that time travel is a relatively recent notion. As Gleick points out, for most of human history, change was incremental – yesterday looked much like today, today much like tomorrow. “Before futurism could be born, people had to believe in progress,” he writes. The development of technology, culminating in the industrial revolution, made that possible. As change abounded, the future, and what it might look like, became a subject for speculation. And as archaeology burgeoned, writers like E Nesbit began flights of fancy to the past, too.

Embraced by novelists, wrestled with by philosophers and informed by science – not least Hermann Minkowski’s revelation, following Einstein’s breakthrough, of four-dimensional spacetime – the possibility that the arrow of time could be tinkered with became a meme. From pulp fiction writers such as Robert Heinlein, to F Scott Fitzgerald and his The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, from Terminator to Dr Who, science fiction blossomed.

As Gleick reveals, problems and paradoxes immediately spewed forth. Is our future governed by fate, or free will? Does time travel always mean ending up naked, your clothes left in the present? What would happen if a time traveller killed his or her grandfather when he was a child? “All the paradoxes are time loops,” writes Gleick as he canvasses the myriad responses to such conundrums. “They all force us to think about causality.”

Among those doing the thinking are philosophers and scientists. Attempting to tackle the idea that wormholes – tunnels in spacetime – could be turned into time machines allowing journeys into the past, even Stephen Hawking has entered the fray, concluding in his “chronology protection conjecture” that the laws of physics prevent it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt in the 2008 film version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on Scott Fitzgerald’s short story about time travel. Photograph: Paramount/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

The consummate temporal tour guide, Gleick deftly navigates the twists and turns of our fascination with time travel, investigating its evolution in literature, exploring scientific principles that have hinted at or scotched the idea, and teasing apart the curious spell it cast across society with its suggestion of immortality.

But, as he notes, not every product of this obsession with time was profound. “The time capsule is a characteristically 20th-century invention: a tragicomic time machine. It lacks an engine, goes nowhere, sits and waits,” he writes, surveying various attempts to send snapshots of civilisation into the future. Indeed, it’s hard to know whether disappointment, amusement or simply bafflement will be the dominant emotion when the Crypt of Civilisation time capsule at Oglethorpe in Atlanta is opened in 8113 AD. Created in 1936, its contents, Gleick reveals, include a movie magazine, an electric toaster and a “lady’s breast form”.

Not every idea of time travel is rooted in the physical, and Gleick explores how in the act of storytelling we mess with chronology. “We don’t have enough tenses. Or rather, we don’t have enough names for all the tenses we create,” he writes of the complexity unleashed in literature by the concept. Readers, too, become time travellers, able to move at will backwards and forwards through a story. More than that, Gleick argues, books cannot be detached from time. “Even if you know a book well – even if you can recite it entire, like the Homeric poet – you cannot experience it as a timeless object,” he writes.

In probing the role of imagination and memory, Gleick also gives space to the concept of mental time travel, the phenomenon which allows us to immerse ourselves in our past and muse upon what the future might hold. But there, too, Gleick, drawing on Proust, uncovers complexity. “Our intelligence writes and rewrites again the story it is trying to recall,” he warns.

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Time Travel is intoxicating, but that is only in part down to Gleick’s execution. Much of this is well trodden ground, our enduring fascination with the notion sown long ago by many adroit hands. At times, Gleick seems to get lost in his own, sometimes opaque, musings. Parts of the book are frustratingly repetitive, while his practice of paraphrasing obscure time travel stories before analysing their finer points too often feels like the dinner party anecdote that rather feebly concludes “Well, you had to be there really”.

Exasperations aside, Time Travel reminds us that our relationship with the slippery concept of time is far from static: technology continues to shape our view, even now. “With persistent connectedness time gets tangled,” Gleick notes. With the internet, it seems, time ahead and time past are both brought into the present.

• Time Travel: A History by James Gleick is published by Pantheon (£16.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99