The Light of Other Days - Softcover

Arthur C. Clarke; Stephen Baxter

3.98

7,534 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812576403 ISBN 13: 9780812576405

Publisher: Tor Science Fiction, 2001

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When a brilliant, driven industrialist harnesses the cutting edge of quantum physics to enable people everywhere, at trivial cost, to see one another at all times: around every corner, through every wall, into everyone's most private, hidden, and even intimate moments. It amounts to the sudden and complete abolition of human privacy--forever.

Then, as society reels, the same technology proves able to look backwards in time as well. What happens next is a story only Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter could tell. The Light of Other Days is a novel that will change your view of what it is to be human.

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Review:

The crowning achievement of any professional writer is to get paid twice for the same material: write a piece for one publisher and then tweak it just enough that you can turn around and sell it to someone else. While it's specious to accuse Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke of this, fans of both authors will definitely notice some striking similarities between Light of Other Days and other recent works by the two, specifically Baxter's Manifold: Time and Clarke's The Trigger.

The Light of Other Days follows a soulless tech billionaire (sort of an older, more crotchety Bill Gates), a soulful muckraking journalist, and the billionaire's two (separated since birth) sons. It's 2035, and all four hold ringside seats at the birth of a new paradigm-destroying technology, a system of "WormCams," harnessing the power of wormholes to see absolutely anyone or anything, anywhere, at any distance (even light years away). As if that weren't enough, the sons eventually figure out how to exploit a time-dilation effect, allowing them to use the holes to peer back in time.

For Baxter's part, the Light of Other Days develops another aspect of Manifold's notion that humanity might have to master the flow of time itself to avert a comparatively mundane disaster (yet another yawn-inducing big rock threatening to hit the earth); Clarke, just as he did with Trigger's anti-gun ray, speculates on how a revolutionary technology can change the world forever. --Paul Hughes

About the Author:

Born in Minehead, Somerset in 1917, Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps the most celebrated science fiction author alive today. He is the author of more than sixty books with more than 50 million copies in print, and the winner of all the field's highest honors. He was named Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1986.

In 1945 he published the technical paper "Extra-terrestrial Relays", which in essence invented the principle of worldwide communication via geosynchronous satellite.

His well-known novels include Childhood's End; Against the Fall of Knight; 2001:A Space Odyssey; Rendezvous with Rama; Imperial Earth; The Fountains of Paradise; 2010: Odyssey Two; 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001. In 1968, he collaborated with director Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was derived from his story "The Sentinel."

He has lived in Colombo, Sri Lanka since 1956. He was awarded the CBE in 1989 and knighted in 1998.

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