Tor Books
320 Pages
Not all the book reviews I do are going to be brand new books. Sometimes I find older books that are worthy of a read and worthy of a review. Such is the case with The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. It was written way back in 1999-2000. These older, hard science-fiction books have incredible views of a future world.
It is 2035, and a cranky billionaire with delusions of grandeur has developed a way to harness the power of mini wormholes to allow people to see anything or anyone anywhere. It basically destroys any semblance of privacy. People are infatuated with the so-called “Worm Cams.” Soon, everyone has one and everyone is obsessed with it. Lives are turned upside down. What is your husband actually doing right now while he claims to be working late?
The billionaire’s two sons continue to work on the technology, with one of them discovering a way to expand the use of the “Worm Cams” to look back in time at any event. Lives are destroyed. There are no more secrets. Nothing is off limits. It changes the way humans interact with each other. It brings about a fundamental change in human nature, and it’s not always for the best, just like most new technologies.
This book is nearly a quarter of a century old, but some of the events and actions of the book are eerily prescient to what we know today. An obsessed public is more concerned with what’s going on behind their neighbor’s doors rather than the actions of people in power. As with all leading-edge technologies, it was a boon for the adult entertainment industry.
In one critique of the story, the authors reinforced the stereotype that the rich are evil. I do not think that’s uniformly true, but I do think there is some truth to it. I don’t believe that all evil billionaires are clones of Snidely Whiplash, which is how Clarke and Baxter portrayed the main antagonist in the novel. There wasn’t a lot of depth to the character. He was a limpid stereotype with almost no depth. Most of the characters in this novel fall into this same pitfall. They are mostly devoid of real human emotion. It is the technology and how it’s used that is the real focus of this novel.
This book was an eerily true-ish statement of modern life despite being written twenty four years ago. Both Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter are master storytellers. They are able to draw the reader in and entertain us while we turn the pages. They weave an all too plausible story of technology that runs away, almost out of control, which is so often a cautionary tale of our real lives. Good science-fiction writers can give a good guess as to what the future holds. Great science-fiction writers can grasp what the future truly holds, years before the events actually happen. Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter are great science-fiction writers. They bring the future to life.
Craig Bacon loves great science-fiction. It’s harder to find these days, but when he finds it, he loves it.