The Light Of Other Days

The Light of Other Days is the 2000 Arthur C. Clarke / Stephen Baxter collaboration, a hard-SF novel built around a single technological premise: micro-wormholes that let anyone observe anywhere in real time, and shortly afterward, anywhere in the past. The Hiram Patterson character is the Murdoch / Bezos figure who privatizes the WormCam first; the novel follows what happens to journalism, family secrets, religion, intelligence agencies, and the historical record over roughly twenty years after the cat leaves the bag.

Baxter is doing most of the prose work, but the conceptual engineering is unmistakably Clarke: a single Clarkean Big Idea, followed all the way down. The first half (universal surveillance, the death of personal privacy) is the contemporary thriller; the second half (the WormCam pointed at biblical history, at the assassination of Lincoln, at the actual Crucifixion) is the hard-SF metaphysical novel. The character work is thin in places, especially the family-melodrama subplot, but the conceptual sweep is some of the most ambitious work in either writer’s catalog. The ending is uncharacteristically religious for Clarke.

Recommended for hard-SF readers who liked Childhood’s End or 2001 and want a late-Clarke version of the same metaphysical move, and for anyone looking for books like The Light of Other Days in the privacy-extinction subgenre (David Brin’s Earth, Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End). Solid four stars.