The Light of Other Days 56
| The Light of Other Days | |
| author | Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter |
| pages | 316 |
| publisher | Tom Doherty Associates |
| rating | 8 |
| reviewer | Cliff Lampe |
| ISBN | 0312871996 |
| summary | Solid, with strong characters and interesting ideas. |
The Scenario
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.
Those who do not learn from history.... (Score:1)
An inventor had developed a viewing-machine that let the user look into the past, by tracing tachyons or some residual radiation, etc etc, the idea being that they could tune the machine to ancient Rome and learn what actually happened at these events that modern history had blurred (because he was being funded by some museum). It also talked a bit about how he was forced to add filters on behalf of the Catholic Church, such that the device could never look at year 0 and verify (or disprove) the existance of Christ. But at the end of the story, the scientist is visited by the NSA, who try to sieze all of his work...
but the hero has outsmarted them, because in an Open Source fashion, he had mailed a copy of the plans to all of the major newspapers the day before. Then the government employee explains to him how his device could not only look on the far past, but at the near, 1 second ago past, and he was personally responsible for inventing the ultimate scrying device.
As to the blurb, I'm sure that you've all ready Harlequin and the Tick Tock Man? If not, why not?
Re:Not an entirely new concept. (Score:1)
Almost all crime would disappear. Would people embrace the lack of privacy or try to get the machines controlled. Of course dictators would try to control it and it would be a powerful tool for them, but they try to hide their own actions and lie about them, so as long as people are watching from free countries, it would seem to eventually lead to freedom everywhere (I think).
Would it hurt research for companies to know their competitors could spy on them? Of course, it would also make it easy for them to prove their competitors spied on them?
Would people become more puritanical, would life become like it is in a small town (only more so)? Or would people learn to accept the petty perversions and infidelities that we now hide?
Unlike time travel stories, there's at least no logical contradictions to viewing the past.
Doh! (Score:1)
Re:Recycled title? (Score:1)
Re:Not an entirely new concept. (Score:1)
inventing a past-time viewing machine and then realizing that it could also
be used to spy on anyone (since "1 second ago" is also in the past).
Don't remember the name of the story offhand...
Re:Other books that deal with this (Score:1)
Re:Recycled title? (Score:2)
Another piece... (Score:1)
The FBI Already Has It. (Score:4)
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.
Re:interesting cultural changes (Score:1)
Clarke not writing (Score:1)
The first thing I flashed on... (Score:1)
Re:Not an entirely new concept. (Score:1)
You're thinking of Factoring Humanity, by Robert Sawyer. It's a good book, particularly in the way he ties together such apparently unrelated fields as topology, quantum physics, and psychology.
The crypto fans on Slashdot will be amused by the subplot, wherein the protagonist's husband, a computer scientist, invents a quantum computer capable of easily performimg prime factorizations of large numbers, and thus breaking most of the world's cryptographic capability. He starts to get visits from mysterious characters who want to sequester the work.
well, its a automatic buy for me (Score:1)
Re:Not an entirely new concept. (Score:2)
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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Re:Not an entirely new concept. (Score:1)
"The Dead Past" (Score:1)
Slow glass. (Score:2)
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.
Re:Not an entirely new concept. (Score:1)
Re:Bandwidth... (Score:1)
mmm, downloading theater-quality movies from Hotline, yum....
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The End of Slashdot (Score:1)
So what happens when you get tired of watching N*t*l** P*rtm*n from fertilized ovum onward?
Recycled title? (Score:3)
Re:Not an entirely new concept. (Score:1)
Can't remember the name of it or even the author, but it's an interesting concept. Basically there have been these "alien" signals picked up for the last 20 years, repeating same time every day, with a different "image" on each one. They finally stop, one person puts the puzzle together and they build this machine that allows them to view the world in the 4th dimension. The authors take on the 4th dimension was kind of an "overmind" which could be used to view all peoples thoughts/memories etc. The aliens that have been broadcasting this message have also been travelling towards earth the entire time and they finally get here, the 2 overminds from the different planets finally touch and everybody on the world experiences true empathy.
Very interesting read.. I wish I could remember the authors name
Amazing Quote (Score:1)
Timothy, I don't usually agree with your viewpoint on most Slashdot stories, but I have to say this is one of the most revealing quote I've read in a long time. Thanks.
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Re:Relationships are what Sci-Fi is about (Score:1)
I wanted to post something along these lines too.
In my opinion, too many sci-fi authors delved headlong into the "science" behind the story (in fact just making possible conjecture related to "what we know" and in no way enhancing the story at all) and forget about the "people" in the story, or the story itself. Why complain when an author attempts to make a story a little more real by attaching a personality to the characters? If you want a dry science read, go pick up a science book. But for a sci-fi story, you don't need to know every detail of every possible scientific explaination for each situation presented. You need a good story, and an explaination of that story from human perspective. Like it or not, a big part of human life is about human interaction: relationships.
For a prime example of solid sci-fi (sometimes called space opera) look at the Hyperion/Endymion books by Dan Simmons. He gave very few scientific details, but makes you just *beg* for more. The whole thing is based on how personal relationships affect the outcome of the entire fate of humanity. That's good sci-fi. That's a good story.
Re:There will be no privacy. (Score:1)
Allow me to be anal about the above statement:
I fully agree that at some point in the future, there may be a technology that will render privacy an obsolete notion, which will bring our Western society as we know it crashing down on it knees, never to return.
However, I'd like to draw a distinction between the destruction of "society" and of "humankind". Privacy going the way of the dodo will greatly affect North America and Europe - generally, the Developed worlds. However, it won't make a lick of difference to those squatting behind bushes waiting to club a rabbit or toiling away in rice paddies or herding sheep on a mountainside. Their society may change due to ours collapsing, but it won't be destroyed.
And as sad and fragile a species as we've become, we'll prevail. A lot of people might die while our societal paradigm changes, but homo sapiens will remain firmly glued to the face of this planet, and we'll continue on as best we know how.
My $0.005. (Government took the rest...)
Re:Recycled title? (Score:1)
I wonder if that had any impact on the title choice of this book.
Cliff 'Lampe' sheds 'Light' (Score:1)
Re:interesting cultural changes (Score:1)
So yes, in countries where only the government has the technology, they could use it to oppress. Just like guns. But what if everyone had it? Perhaps it is just a translation of the second amendment.
Perhaps some countries would expend massive amounts of military force to tightly control this technology (like China's media), but I doubt that could happen in America. Our citizenry is too armed and edgy and suspicious (and based more on $$$, not moral/ethical values). I think it would be hard to supress any sizeable sect in america. Even though secession is against federal law, if the Freemen or the Davidians had numbers in the millions, they wouldn't have lost to the Feds.
IMHO, I don't think the resolution of conflict in which all sides are armed with the same technology would be a "...a rather oppressive State with a large percentage of the population in jail..." as you put it.
I think there would be too much public sentiment in favor of this technology, and hopefully the muscle of the governement (the actual soldiers) would share the same.
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Re:interesting cultural changes (Score:1)
Are you cheating on your SOs? Embezzling? Consuming illegal substances (booze in the Middle East, Khat in the US) ? Praying to the wrong Ghods? Writing agaisnt the government?
Somewhere in the world one or more of those activies would get you into deep trouble. A fully transparent society would seem to lead either to a rather oppressive State with a large percentage of the population in jail or worse, or a small-l libratarian condition where most activities are OK.
In either case expect struggles, if not out and out warfare. Most people have certain activities that they can not tolerate other people doing.
Re:The FBI Already Has It. (Score:1)
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Re:The FBI Already Has It. (Score:1)
Re:The FBI Already Has It. (Score:1)
> I'm not sure how one could possibly ...
> tap information from the weak signals
> coming from the microprocessor, that
> sounds nearly impossible,
Actually, I have read somewhere that it is not only possible to do this, but it is possible to write a virus which, when run on the target machine, could use emanations from the cpu to transmit a message (say, a file on the hard drive) to a listening antenna by making the cpu perform certain instructions. The victim, of course, would have absolutely no way of knowing that any information had actually left the machine (i.e. a network monitor wouldn't even blink at this, because the data isn't going out over any conventional network connection). Incredibly interesting concept, I'd love to know if anyone has ever actually pulled this off. The closest I've seen in real life is one web site (I don't have the exact url but I'm pretty sure it was one of the links on this page [eskimo.com]) where this guy had written a program to demonstrate this, and had hooked up an antenna to a microphone, recorded the morse-code style sounds coming from the cpu, and put the sound files up for people to download and listen to. The transmission rate was obviously pretty crappy (we're talking a few bits per second at most), but given enough time and effort, it would be very interesting to see what might come out of that kind of research.
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smile at the camera (Score:1)
Try to find fiji.
a'la The Truman Show
The Amazing Asimov Chronoscope (Score:1)
In the end, the government tracks them down and explains to them that the past is not way back when, so many years ago as people are supposed to think, but NOW! The past can also be set for seconds! The present is always becoming the past! But alas, the physicist's Uncle Ralph, a science writer, has forwarded instructions for pocket chronoscopes to several magazines. The world is doomed.
"Happy goldfish bowl to you all," said (government guy's name), "and may you all burn in hell forever."
Re:Time travel (Score:1)
Re:Not an entirely new concept. (Score:1)
Re:The FBI Already Has It. (Score:2)
Well, no two cars are exactly alike either. But that doesn't stop the same police radar gun from reading their speed.
The signals that someone would be intercepting would be generated by the host computer, not by the monitor. It's just that the monitor is a very convenient transmitting antenna for everything that leaves your VGA port.
Your deflection circuits would provide a really strong signal to help point a directional antenna, and they'd also provide you with sync information (top of frame, horizontal and vertical reset, refresh rates, etc.) that you can use later on once you've captured the video.
Once you've used the H and V circuits as a good signal with which to point your antenna, you can rest assured that the video signal that your VGA port puts out is amplified quite a bit (from about 1V p~p to about 90V p~p) within your monitor. The cathode drive voltage on most monitors is about 90V. Given the frequencies involved for high res VGA video (ie. leading and trailing edges of a sharp vertical line on the screen), for good bandwidth, everything would have to be pretty low impedance to minimize the effects of stray capacitance in the video driver stages. Which makes the basics for a very good radio transmitter.
Now, in response to the post to which I'm responding, I'm sure similar models will radiate the RF with similar efficiency. But two dissimilar models side by side will probably be somewhat different in their behavior.
Your motherboard, too, is a pretty damned good transmitter, but to actually be able to make sense of the sheer noise coming off my spectrum analyzer when I point the antenna near my old Pentium 166MMX, I can't say. But the information is all there, with the change of state of every line on the address, data, control, MFM, IDE, etc. buses, a nice spike of RF energy is transmitted.
I can clearly make out my 66MHz processor bus (sorry, guys, it's not overclocked) on the spectrum analyzer; I can clearly make out my 166MHz clock, I can clearly make out a 7.8MHz pulsetrain that I assume to be my ISA bus, and I can see a spike at 33MHz that I assume is either my PCI bus or is the base oscillator that is clock-doubled to make my 66MHz bus.
I'm reminded at this point that I damned well need a new computer, but between my low pay, high taxes and high rent, I can't seem to afford it. Anybody want to hire a self-professed video guru and computer geek? Assets include a warped sense of humor...
Slashcode bug... (Score:2)
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 [ncsu.edu].
Go, Human Karma Torch! (Score:1)
...and if the code is in Perl, maybe he'll just overflow a floating-point number, or force it into scientific notation...
Of course, by 2003, we'll have perl scripts identify the topic, and replay the top posts from 6 months ago. "Karma Whore Bots", if you will.
...and this wormhole device might be the only way to accurately look at old Slashdot postings, since they'd all be eaten by the database by then.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
confused?! (Score:1)
This seems to be a favored tactic of Clarke. Some of Stanley Kubrik's vagueness must have rubbed off on him.
kick some CAD [cadfu.com]
TO the stupid Moderator in question: (Score:2)
Read my sig, you stupid motherfucker.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
With Clarke's Name on it (Score:1)
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that usually Clarke runs just a little ahead of the trend: IE Released 2001 before it was possible, stuff like that. This time though, he's released it when it's immediately relevant. I wonder why??
Bandwidth... (Score:1)
Not an entirely new concept. (Score:2)
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.
Re:Not an entirely new concept. (Score:1)
Actually, they are not two maverick scientists and there is more to the story than that.
The older guy of the two is a historian who wants to study Sparta (IIRC) and the younger guy is a newly appointed physics professor. They create a working model and pass it on to the younger guys uncle who is a professional grant writer.
More than the social effects of the said machine which was only implied with an "Oh sh*t" in the end (sort of), I was intrigued by the professional classes. People were experts in only one field of science and not allowed to explore any other field but their own. IIRC, the young scientist was an gravity expert and the historian convinces him to study light.
The reason the machine did not work was because looking back in time is like looking into water, the deeper you want to see, the dimmer your vision becomes. Too much dust (figurative) was the explanation.
There will be no privacy. (Score:1)
There is no doubt that advanced technology developed by any civilization will eventually be what destroys it. In our society where we value our privacy so much, it will be the technology that destroys it. Face it, in our society, money drives all. We can't stop privacy from being taken away -- we can only delay such!
Re:Slashcode bug... (Score:1)
Actually, I have a page [ncsu.edu] or two there about that... To get the full effect, follow the link, too!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Relationships are what Sci-Fi is about (Score:1)
Irony... (Score:1)
"Cliff Lampe sheds light today on a book..."
I kinda find this ironic...was this choice of words intentional? :P
Just wondering...Kyle Johnson
Re:well, its a automatic buy for me (Score:2)
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.)
Time travel (Score:3)
Ah well, maybe I'll be luckier next time the 'Retro Slashdot' wave hits in 2007. I'd love to flame Microsoft again!
interesting cultural changes (Score:1)
I think the attempt at predicting the effect on pop culture was also worthy of a gold star. I loved the avant-garde beatnicks who lived naked in houses made of glass, as a blantant cultural metaphor. Same goes for the naked teenagers having sex everywhere.
The borg-like brain implants were kinda pushing it. I think such a small faction of paranoid people will exist that there wouldn't be enough funding to mass-market the inviso-suits. However, they would definitely be in the best interest of governments wanting to hide their spies, which would mean the suits would exist. But despite the availability of technology, the writer went through GREAT pains to cover every possible detail of how suit wearers would need to behave to avoid dropping DNA or being tracked. That was cool.
Read "The Transparent Society" by Brin. It reads more like a bunch of lectures than a discourse, but it covers many of the same concepts.
I'm firmly believe that in the future there will absolutely ZERO privacy: everyone will know everyting about everyone else. The challenge will be for all cultures to start ditching their modesty.
Some day we'll all know how big everyone's dick is, how many times they take a shit, and what kind of breakfast cereals they buy. Once a few decades of this kind of knowledge sinks in, modesty in these areas will seem as silly as being modest about showing your calves in a swimsuit, like in the 1910's.
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Re:interesting cultural changes (Score:1)
Re:You forget something... (Score:2)
Other books that deal with this (Score:1)
A good book worth a read.