The Light of Other Days

Cliff Lampe sheds light today on a book that he actually reviewed in the year 2003, but which due to a glitch in the Slashcode has appeared today. What would you do in a world where privacy is non-existent, and certainty absolute? How would you act? It's interesting to consider how ubiquitous observation and long-term record keeping cause us to approach this mythical world (at least in certain aspects of our lives) even without wormholes.

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.

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Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

The FBI Already Has It.

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.

Recycled title?

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?

Time travel

Cliff Lampe sheds light today on a book that he actually reviewed in the year 2003

And, I distinctly recalled, I commented on that review too. Only it got moderated down for mentioning "hot grits".

Ah well, maybe I'll be luckier next time the 'Retro Slashdot' wave hits in 2007. I'd love to flame Microsoft again!