It’s been exactly seven months since I last updated my progress on A Brief History of Timekeeping, with a report that I had submitted the complete manuscript last December. I have since gotten two rounds of editorial comments on it, and made corresponding revisions, and I sent my editor the (hopefully) (mostly) final versions of the figures yesterday, so it now moves off to the production team at BenBella; in a couple of weeks, I’ll get the joy of going over the copyedits…
In celebration of that, here’s the new and improved table of contents:
- Introduction: A Clock Is a Thing That Ticks
- Chapter 1: Sunrise
- Chapter 2: The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars
- Chapter 3: “Give Us Our Eleven Days!”
- Chapter 4: The Apocalypse That Wasn’t
- Chapter 5: Drips and Drops
- Chapter 6: Ticks and Tocks
- Chapter 7: Heavenly Wanderers
- Chapter 8: Celestial Clockwork
- Chapter 9: To the Moon . . .
- Chapter 10: Watch This
- Chapter 11: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?
- Chapter 12: The Measure of Spacetime
- Chapter 13: Quantum Clocks
- Chapter 14: Time and Gravity
- Chapter 15: Time Enough for Everyone
- Chapter 16: The Future of Time
And, up at the top, you see the US cover (there’s a UK cover as well, though I’m not sure that one’s officially released yet). It also has a release date (January 25, 2022), and can be pre-ordered at Amazon and B&N if you are the sort of wonderful person who likes to do that kind of thing (insert boilerplate here about how pre-ordering books is a tremendously good and important thing to do for your favorite authors, and greatly increases the book’s chances of success).
Finishing this one was a bit of a slog, what with the entire world deciding to go batshit crazy when I was four chapters into the first draft. I’m proud of the final product, though, and look forward to it being released to the wider world at last.