Let’s say you’re a time traveler. You’ve headed back into the distant past in your time machine, just like you have dozens of times before, only this time it breaks. You are in the past. There are no other time machines back then. There’s no way to communicate where and when you are to your fellow time travelers. You are trapped. Fortunately, the time travel machine company has left a manual in your machine on how to get things back in order. Not the time machine, mind you; it has no user-serviceable parts. No, this is a manual for putting everything back in order: how to build civilization from scratch.
Ryan North’s How to Invent Everything is a handbook of the principles of science, engineering, agriculture, and language. These topics are all deep and fascinating subjects that take years of study to master and implement, and usually books on the topic are necessarily complicated and often dry. North has found a way past that. This book’s framing device is science fiction but the science is real. While it glosses over a lot of the theory, theory doesn’t matter when you have nothing. Someone already invented it; you just have to do it.
How to Invent Everything mostly maintains the illusion that it’s a repair manual through the main text and the jokes make it for a fun, if mildly technical read. The author inserts a few endnotes that break the illusion to explain where he got the information and there’s a thorough bibliography at the end, but for the majority of the time the premise holds up and keeps our interest.
North has also written a number of comics and a choose your own adventure style version of Hamlet. His humour shows in How to Invent Everything, making it an oddly pleasant way to learn the fundamentals of animal husbandry and basic metallurgy, just two of dozens of topics covered. It’s a perfect read for anyone with even a passing interest in general science and engineering but doesn’t want to get bogged down by details.
Steven McCreedy is a library technician at the Cambie Branch of the Richmond Public Library
