Would you like to learn the Universal Edibility Test? Perhaps you’d find it helpful to have major schools of philosophy “summed up in a few quippy sentences about high-fives”? And maybe you’d like to invent buttons way before they were invented in our timeline?
With this wonderfully playful premise, North (author of Dinosaur Comics, Romeo and/or Juliet: A Chooseable Path Adventure, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl) presents a step-by-step guide, complete with flowcharts, a technology tree, scientific appendices, and footnotes, for inventing everything from language to farming to mining to bicycles to computers. Invention, the book quietly suggests, is its own form of time travel. The answer, according to Ryan North’s wonder of a book How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, is not to try to fix the time machine - in North’s fictional universe, they’re unrepairable - but to instead “fix” the time that you’ve found yourself in by re-inventing all of the technology that you desire, from scratch.
Bad news: you’re stuck in a time that isn’t yours. But afterward, when you climb back into your time machine, you discover that the thing won’t start. You travel to another era, you explore, you marvel, you enjoy. Let’s say that you’ve rented a time machine.
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