How to Invent Everything: Rebuild All of Civilisation (with 96% fewer catastrophes this time) by Ryan North

This is a book about technology wrapped in a fictional framing which makes for an easy read delivery with a good deal of dry humour. I would class it as non-fiction, flavoured with narrative whimsy. That may put some readers off, but that’s fine, everyone has their preferences. I enjoyed it a good deal.

To start at the beginning: The book styles itself as the repair manual for the FC3000TM time machine. Indeed, it begins with a little preamble note about how the author found it embedded in a rock. This very much sets the tone for the rest of the volume. The first few pages of the book proper consist of an introduction to the time machine followed by an FAQ, including questions such as “Can I give my past self lottery numbers?” and “Can I give my past self lottery numbers, and then kill my past self and take their place, so that the lottery winnings go to me instead?” (the answer to both questions is yes, although with caveats).

After the FAQ, the repair manual begins and ends on one page, and it is not much of a spoiler to say that there are no instructions for repairing the FC3000TM time machine (there are, apparently, no user-serviceable parts). Instead, the writer of the manual has decided to fill the rest of a pretty large book describing how to set up civilisation, so that whatever period you, the unlucky time traveller with the broken time machine, have ended up in, you should be able to recreate civilisation with a lot less waiting around. And thus we proceed to the actual non-fiction heart of the book, although the framing device remains in place throughout, to the point that there are two kinds of references; endnotes written by Ryan North commenting on the text, and footnotes made by the “original writer”, also named Ryan North (this itself does not go uncommented). I did not find this particularly awkward, although those who dislike endnotes may find their patience somewhat tried. There are only 44 of them, so it isn’t too bad.

The book is divided into 17 sections, and the first is a flowchart for finding out in which time period you are stranded, starting with the question “Has the Big Bang happened yet?”. It then proceeds to the five fundamental technologies, which are spoken (and/or signed) language, written language, a decent number system, the scientific method, and a calorie surplus. It goes through each of these, explaining in brief why they are important, how and when they first arose, and things the stranded time traveller might want to bear in mind when reinventing civilisation. It does not go into enormous detail. For example, the section on written language touches on the importance of written language and how rare its invention actually is, since it has only appeared twice that we know of, in Egypt and Sumer around 3200 BCE and in Mesoamerica, between 900 and 600 BCE. Potential other occurrences of writing de novo include India and Easter Island, and these are also described along with the issues with each (one being pictographic, and the other being both maybe pictographic and also maybe inspired by writing from outside the culture - in both cases, the scripts are undecipherable). That’s it for the section on written language - from start to finish, it is 5 pages long. The style is conversational and gently comedic, but not in a way that distracts from the information.

The book then proceeds to units of measurement, farming, food, useful plants, animals, nutrition, technologies to address common needs, chemistry, philosophy, art, medicine, music, and computing. That’s a very brief summary of what is a very dense book. I’m not going to go into enormous detail, but to give a bit of a flavour, I’ll describe the farming and plants sections, and the technologies to address common needs.

The first of the farming/plants sections (“Now we are become farmers, the devourers of worlds”) covers plants and selective breeding so that you can encourage the growth of delicious soft juicy peaches instead of nasty little hard ur-peaches. It then goes on to point out that growing the same plant in the same field repeatedly will cause problems, and thus moves on to nitrogen, the various types of crop rotation, and why they are necessary.

The next section (“What will other humans be eating if I’m stranded after they’ve evolved but before agriculture and selective breeding are a thing, and how can I tell if it’s poisonous, because I bet these ancient humans are eating some really stupid stuff?”) covers early foodstuffs. Did you know that figs, olives and pears were being eaten even before the evolution of anatomically modern humans? I didn’t, until this book. Anyway, this brings us back to selective breeding briefly, but since you can’t selectively breed something to taste good if you don’t even know if it’s safe to eat in the first place, it goes on to the important part of this section, information on how to tell if something is genuinely edible. The book even provides a universal edibility test, which takes seventeen and a half hours, and you can’t eat anything else during it - but it’s better than poisoning yourself by accident.

“Putting down roots: Useful plants for the stranded time traveller” covers precisely that; useful plants, their origin, and how they can be used. The notes on each plant don’t go into enormous detail - this is not a guide on the best way to cultivate (for example) rice. It’s more along the lines of a good place to start, along with some tips from the “original timeline”. The section on grapes, for example, points out that the advent of steam travel allowed phylloxera insects to survive the voyage from America to Europe, where they then destroyed vineyards on an epic scale. The stranded time traveller is urged to “invent” the technique of grafting European grape plants onto the root stock of resistant American grape species to overcome this problem.

The section I enjoyed the most was the section covering technologies to address basic human needs. This isn’t organised by time of invention, but rather by topic, and it includes the technologies which are necessary to address each need. Thus, the topic “I’m thirsty” covers how to make charcoal in order to filter water, then goes on to distillation for desalinating seawater (and making alcohol, of course). Each part describes what the technology is, what humans did before it was invented, when it was invented, what is required to make it, and how to invent it. The book remains conversational in style but is reasonably thorough - the “how to invent it” for charcoal covers three and a half pages, starting with the principles of making charcoal (lots of heat but minimal oxygen) and going on to the best way to set up a charcoal kiln and how to monitor the progression of the burn, with a short digression into the uses of tar, a by-product of dry-heating wood. Diagrams are provided here and there where helpful. “I’m hungry” includes information on horseshoes, harnesses, ploughs, preserved foods, bread (and beer and alcohol), and salt production. While there is a separate section on medicine later in the book, the “I’m sick” topic covers penicillin and the stethoscope, on the grounds that these two breakthroughs alone have made a huge difference to human health. There are also topics covering manufacturing resources (mining, smelting, kilns, glass), machines (waterwheels, windmills, flywheels, turbines, steam engines), electricity (batteries, generators, transformers), measuring devices (clocks, thermometers, barometers), appearance (soap, buttons, tanning, spinning), sex (birth control, incubators), and more. I should note that I am no technological polyglot, but where the text went into detail on things I do know about, it didn’t make any obvious mistakes. I was surprised to find no information about weaving, however. The relevant section (“I want people to think I’m attractive”) starts with soap, then goes into buttons, tanning and spinning wheels, then ends without mentioning weaving at all, which seems a bit of an obvious omission.

After “Common human complaints that can be solved by technology”, which is by far the longest section, there are seven sections which are more theoretical, in that they go into the theory underlying important subjects, thus equipping you, the stranded time traveller, to make the most of where you are. The section on chemistry, for example, goes over protons, atoms, neutrons, electron shells, reactions, ionic and covalent bonds, and where it all came from. The others are philosophy, art, medicine, first aid, music, and computers, all technologies that “greatly improve any civilisation”.
The final portion of the book consists of appendices, including a technology tree (what is a pre-requirement for what), a periodic table which should definitely be classed as both fiction and non-fiction, a list of “useful chemicals, how to make them, and how they can definitely kill you”, logical argument forms, trigonometry tables, a list of universal constants (this is a civilisation cheat sheet, remember), musical frequencies, gear types, and finally a list of human internal organs given grades out of ten (highest rating: the liver, with 13/10). It finishes with an afterword from the “our timeline” Ryan North, and the bibliography he used when “checking” and commenting on the text.

As I have said, the style of writing is conversational, amusing and very easy to read. The sections manage to follow on well from each other - I read it straight through without any trouble. The framing is adhered to throughout, and that provides a lot of the humour. For example, the start of the book, where the five fundamental technologies are described, points out that each of these is conceptual and thus requires nothing which humans at the time did not already have, and yet took a very long time to figure out. The table listing them gives the dates when they were invented, the dates when they could have been invented, the years spent not having this technology when we could have, and how many 500-year Roman Empires could have risen and fallen during all that time humanity was sitting around not inventing the technology. It is subtitled “A table any human should be embarrassed to even be in the same room with”. There are “Civilisation Pro Tips” scattered throughout the text which also add comedy (eg “If things are going well, you should not need to get rid of any human bodies”, which comes after the description of how to make lye).

So who might want to read this and why? I’m actually not quite sure who the book is aimed at. It’s easy to read but there’s a lot here, and it assumes a good reading comprehension and an intelligent reader. It’s not a technical manual, nor a history book; it doesn’t go into enough detail to satisfy someone who wanted to learn about one particular period of history, or one particular technology, or even the rise of civilisation as a whole, which would be a far bigger book. It grazes culture only very briefly, mainly as context for inventions. It’s tongue-in-cheek, which I enjoyed, but others might find annoying. If pushed, I’d class it as popular science, but it’s not like any of the other popular science books I’ve read, which were all much more focussed on a specific topic.

Personally, I wanted this book because I thought it would make an excellent reference for world-building. One of my hobbies is writing fantasy, and I love playing with alternate cultures and technologies, but making sure they are all plausible together can be a daunting prospect. One thing which has always worried me is including a technology without its logical prerequisites, and I hoped the book would be helpful in pointing out those kinds of errors. I think it definitely will be useful, but the technology tree in the appendices is not the panacea I’d have hoped for. Rather than showing which technologies are absolutely required for a downstream invention, it shows what would be ideal, fitting the book’s recommendations. For example, while welding and the radio are great inventions for use with boats, they are not prerequisites to building boats and crossing oceans, as history has already demonstrated. But there is plenty of information in the text itself, and the bibliography also makes for a good starting point if I want to know more.

So I’d recommend this book for people who like tongue-in-cheek overviews of history and technology, people who enjoy light-hearted but satisfying non-fiction, people who are curious about where to start inventing civilisations both real and fictional, and yes, if you are a stranded time traveller, it would be a very handy guide, but I don’t think many people reading this will fit into that latter category. If you do, to quote the book, “What are you complaining about? You didn’t go that far back. You’ll be FINE.”