In a way this author resembles his own subjects. He's as frantic as the imperial explorers and inventors themselves, endlessly working away, never pausing to wonder why. They've infected him, you feel, and caught him up in their ambition to reduce the globe to manageable proportions. It's not a bad method, allowing your subject to take you over, succumbing to its forward momentum. But it wearied the empire-builders, it no doubt wearied Fishlock, and now, sadly, it's likely to weary the average reader.
It's always important to remember that the excerpts from reviews printed on a paperback's cover are the very best things the publishers can find on the subject. When you read them, remember that no critic ever wrote anything more laudatory than this. In the case of this book, the excerpts mention such things as "scope" and "teeming bustle of discovery," but stop short there.
Reading the book, you're breathless after 40 pages, and yet there are another 400 to go. But if you want to know that for millennia man traveled on land at little more than 6.4kph, then, after he domesticated the horse in Central Asia, at around 16kph, then suddenly in the 1840s, with the perfection of steam transport, accelerated to 112kph and even 160kph, then you'll find it here.
These were the years when everything changed, not only in transport but in the communication of information. And, of course, the process has continued past the period the author covers. Are we approaching some sort of end? Can anything be quicker than e-mail? Perhaps not, but other advances in information technology are in the pipeline, offering enhanced capacity and scope, if no longer actual increases in speed. All this awaits a new Fishlock. This one, I imagine, will be too horrified by the prospect to attempt a sequel.
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