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The Light of Other Days
It's a stone's throw into the future, and an aggressive Northwest coast company (hmmmm) has developed a new technology for sending data. Harnessing a small wormhole, people are able to send data through the worm hole instantaneously. Alright, suspend disbelief and give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. This piece is just in the very beginning, and things are gonna get a whole lot wackier as we go on.
Some sort of megalomaniac entrepeneur owns the company that patents this technology, as well as several media holdings. He realizes that light waves are just another form of information, and if he can send a wormhole to some programmed location, he gets the scoop on all of his competitors. What's it mean? He can examine documents on the desks of world leaders, catch the famous in all sorts of pecadilloes, and arrange coverage of natural disasters in intimate detail and immediately. As you may imagine, the government catches wind of this and things start going to hell. This is the most interesting central idea to this book. What happens when there is no privacy at all? When your neighbors could buy a machine that allows them to watch you shagging your girlfriend if they wanted to? How are people going to cope with such an open social environment?
But hang on space fans. While society is still reeling from this total loss of privacy, the company with the wormhole patent discovers that by adjusting its strnegth, you can actually watch things from the past as they happen. Eventually they work out sound and navigation, so you can in essence watch any point in history from any angle as many times as you want.
This is the other central theme of this book that makes it interesting. Faced with an infallible memory of events, do things get better or worse? We all lie to ourselves constantly. Memory is more of a negotiation between the brain and the psyche than any sort of reliable record. How do we survive when our illusions are stripped away from us, and we have no more excuses? Every one of your mistakes is there for you, to relive in technicolor as many times as it takes for you to slit your wrists. And soon, it's not only your own sins and errors that come back to haunt you, but those of your entire species. This book deals with the loss of our myths, illusions and constructed realities, and how we go about putting them all back into place.
What's Good?
The best part of this book is the strength of the central ideas. It is plain-old interesting to consider an eventuality where all pretenses of privacy are stripped away, where it becomes nearly impossible to drop off the grid. What lengths will people go to to avoid their spying neighbors? In the book, a secret society gets started to help some people hide themselves away, some people commit suicide and others just give in to it. What would you do?
Another fascinating aspect of this book is the rate of technological change that occurs in it. No sooner does society have to adjust to having no privacy in the present, but the technology shifts and they have to give up their privacy in the past as well as the wormhole is strengthened to allow real time observation of past events. People start to put wormholes in their heads to form some sort of thought collective (yes, like in Diamond Age) and the technology takes a further twist at the end of the book. This whirlwind tour of technological changes imparts a sense of how it must feel for the characters in the book.
Clarke and Baxter do an admirable job of weaving together their individual strengths as authors. The descriptions of the deep past, which is Baxter's purview, are compelling and the contributions of Clarke's are as obvious and as well produced. Baxter has proven to be a quality sci-fi writer and is ably supported by one of the mythic legends of the genre.
What's Bad?
The same whirlwind introduction of elements that are a strength of this story at times become ravelled at the edges and leave a feeling of plot holes. There were times that the story shifts so much that I felt like rubbing my neck in sympathethic whiplash pains. While this does create an impression of confusion that is appropriate to the central themes of the book, it is also distracting at points in the story.
Also, there is a good bit of this book that deals with the personal relationships of the main characters. It's not that these interactions are poorly done, it's just that I would have preferred that ink be spent on delving more into applications of the technology at the center of the story. Now, I'm not one of those wackos that is against any sort of attention to the personal lives of the characters in my sci-fi, but it seemed extraneous in this particular offering.
So What's In It For Me?
At the time of writing, this book is ubiquitous in airports and other places where they have paperback bestsellers available. The Light of Other Days is a perfect read for those types of "trapped-in-a-hellish-flying-box" kind of situations. It's a gripping, complex and thought-provoking book that does not get bogged down in obtuse situational plot devices.
While this may not ever become a classic of sci-fi, it is well worth the effort if you've been looking for something to read. This is definitely above the pack of recent sci-fi offerings and should catch your attention for some relaxing hours of speculation on how you would use your own personal wormhole.
Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
The short story "Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw appeared in a book "Other Days, Other Eyes". "Light of Other Days" was just a short interlude showing a slow glass farmer using the glass to remember his dead family. "Other Days, Other Eyes" told the full story of the development of slow glass, the way society was changed by it, and its eventual use for spying on the citizens.
Quoted from Article:
When your neighbors could buy a machine that allows them to watch you shagging your girlfriend if they wanted to?Well, almost.
Just remember that not only the FBI but also most cable companies already have the ability to drive past your house and see what's on your TV screen.
The tuner in your TV, VCR or cable box is superheterodyne, meaning it mixes a local oscillator with the incoming signal. The frequency of the local oscillator, when it's at the same frequency as a particular TV channel that you want to watch, produces a beat signal that is amplified by the electronics of the device.
Superhet is a great system, and that's why it's in virtually everything that receives RF. (I wonder if RCA still gets royalties on the patent?)
But, the signal of the local oscillator does leak out of the tuner, and if you look for it and measure its frequency, you know what the TV is tuned to.
ie. "That's very interesting. The house at 15 Robin Hood Lane has a TV set tuned to HBO, but they don't pay for HBO..."
When the cable guy rings your doorbell to do an unexpected "signal check", never let him in. If you're a cable thief, that is.
But that's not the only thing your TV set spits out. All conventional TV sets and monitors have very powerful circuits for deflecting the electron beams in the picture tube. They radiate a lot of electromagnetic energy. Now, the jury's still out on whether or not they cause any health effects, but I can promise you that they're very easy to detect.
Use the deflection signals from a TV set or monitor to point your antenna directly at it and sync your receiver to it.
Then, all you'd need to do is amplify the everything you're picking up in the 150kHz to 5MHz range, and use it to drive a CRT.
All of a sudden, the van parked in front of your house can see the creative accounting processes you use to keep your business afloat, as you type innocently away at your computer. Or they can see from your TV what kind of kinky movies you like. Etc.
Of course, you could wrap everything electronic in your house with aluminum foil connected to a cold water pipe or other suitable ground, but it detracts a little from their safety, working life and usefulness.
Privacy doesn't exist, hasn't for years, and that says nothing of cellular/cordless phones. Or listening devices that any ambitious high school kid can build with a laser pointer and a tripod, devices that can be positioned miles away from you and yet use your windows as listening devices. Nothing.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The Dead Past
:)
First Published In: Astounding Science Fiction, April 1956, pp. 6-46
Collections:
Earth Is Room Enough
The Best of Isaac Asimov
The Far Ends of Time and Earth (omnibus edition)
The Edge Of Tomorrow
The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov
Other Worlds of Isaac Asimov
The Complete Stories, Volume 1
Anthologies:
Five-Odd, Groff Conklin, ed. Pyramid (pbk), 1964, pp. 8-54
Beyond Control, Robert Silverberg, ed. Thomas Nelson, 1972, pp. 162-219
The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels, Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Arbor House, 1980, pp. 302-345
The Analog Anthology #1, Stanley Schmidt, ed. Davis Publications, 1981, pp. 187-260
6 Decades: The Best of Analog, Stanley Schmidt, ed. Davis Publications, 1986, pp. 35-67
Worlds Imagined: 14 Short Science Fiction Novels, Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Avenel, 1989, pp. 302-345
The World Treasury of Science Fiction, David G. Hartwell and Clifton Fadiman, eds. Little Brown, 1989, pp. 503-543
Foreign Anthologies:
Kroki W Nie-Zname, Warsaw: Iskry, 1970
Good story. He used a different concept, that of neutrinos traveling forward in time could be read somehow.. Kinda nifty idea, anyway.
There was also a subplot going on about how knowledge had become so compartmentalized that nobody dared think outside their realm of expertise, as it were. It's a bit long for a short story though and tends to ramble, a lot like Asimov.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
At first I thought this was a review of a collection of Bob Shaw's (I think)"slow glass" stories, the first of which was "Light of Other Days" (written sometime in the mid 1960s).
Slow glass was a material that transmitted images (like glass) very, very slowly -- up to several years in some cases, but it could be manufactured with varying time thicknesses (eg "24 hours thick", or "2 years thick"). (Ignore for the sake of the story the physics problems of storing a few years worth of, say, sunlight in a material a few millimeters thick.)
In a later story (I forget the title) it turns out that the government is sowing the countryside with little beads of (differing time) slow-glass: a spying mechanism where you just collect up the glass beads later and look at what went on.
Slow glass itself is probably a physical impossibility, but the ubiquitous spying is not: imagine billions of nano-cams with varying amounts of storage, or some sort of cellular wireless communication. You could (well, almost -- as far as we know the state-of-the-art is not quite there) make them the size of ants, with sufficient ant-like AI to let them crawl around. Perhaps they relay their images to a "queen ant" with a little more processing ability and broadcast range. Optical quality per image might be low (given the tiny optics), but combining multiple images gets around that, you could even get good 3-D images with multiple sensors and good position information (a couple of pairs of queen ants could triangulate that).
A lot more likely than magic wormholes, they just don't give you a record any further back than their deployment.
-- Alastair
I thought that the central premise of "Light of Other Days" was that scientists had developed "slow glass" which let light through at such slow speeds that past events could be observed hours, days, or even months later. I read it in installments in Analog Science Fiction. The last installment I read had the government grinding up slow glass into dust-mote size particles and spreading it everywhere by aircraft. The idea being that it would be ubiqutious and, using microscopy, any past event could be observed. This story line sounds completely different. Has the title been recycled?
You know, that actually wouldn't surprise me.
It's probably a temporal bug in Perl 6.006_065; it's been a known bug ever since the slashdot rabbit holes were created, and a post from Signul_94956 (#473457) got sent through...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No, no, no; not that post; THIS POST.
Read my sig, you stupid motherfucker.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Isaac Asimov wrote a story based on a similar concept a number of years (decades?) ago. IIRC, the title was "The Dead Past".
Interestingly, the technology in Asimov's story developed the other way-- devices were created to view historical events, but were tremendously expensive, and tightly controlled by the government. A pair of maverick scientists discover that they can produce a working model from available parts, and release the plans to the world.
Unfortunately for society, it's only then, once it's too late, that they realize that the devices can also be used to view the past so recent, it's for all practical purposes the same as the present. All though the story ends before the social effects can become known, the implication is that this will cripple society.
Clarke used to be an auto buy for me, but Songs of Distant Earth was the last one I liked. IMO, he went downhill really fast after that. (There's a rumor that he didn't actually write anything after that. Not that I pay much attention to rumors, but I'd almost prefer to believe that one.)
Ah well, maybe I'll be luckier next time the 'Retro Slashdot' wave hits in 2007. I'd love to flame Microsoft again!
-Denor
A bit on the loose side. But thanks anyway.