The Light Of Other Days | ||||||||
Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter | ||||||||
Tor Books, 316 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Ernest Lilley
Hiram Patterson, global media magnate of the 2030s, is tired of getting scooped by other news
services. So he spends a few billion dollars on research and develops a way to manipulate
subatomic wormholes to connect any two points and open a window to anywhere allowing him to
put a camera on the spot instantaneously. I suppose he could have just used web-cams but what
fun would that have been?
Hiram also wants to create a dynasty, àla Joe Kennedy, and is using his two sons and the
wormhole discovery to do it. For a time, he lost his first son to the religion virus, as he puts it, and
has taken careful steps to make sure that won't happen with Bobby, the second. Thanks to Kate
Manzoni, a willful freelance journalist who falls in love with Bobby, all the careful plans Hiram
has for the future threaten to come undone and the two wind up on the run in a world where
surveillance technology can see anyplace, any time.
Even though I liked the lovers on the run part of the story, and the characters in general, The Light
Of Other Days is really about the ideas the authors unfold. They bring out the looming threat of
asteroid impact, silvering of America, cognitive enhancers to combat senility, massive climactic
shifts with permanent storms and northern Europe frozen over, elective brain surgery, Catholicism
in England and cultism in the US and more. It's Clarke's library of ideas displayed by in grand
style by Baxter.
When the discovery is made that the wormholes can tunnel across not only space but also time,
another of Sir Arthur's sacred cows ambles forth as the book spends a considerable amount of time
debunking the saints and heroes of the ages. Ultimately the wormhole device is, as the authors put
it, a truth machine, and the they use it to show the panorama of human history, first tearing down
the notion of godhood, and then showing the connections of all life on the planet as they trace a
single life backwards in time through it's ancestors all the way back to a single-celled organism and
beyond.
It nagged at me as I read this section that I had seen the demystifying of history by being able to
see into the past before... and most likely by Clarke himself... indeed I had, and the authors are nice
enough to point it out in the afterward. The previous work was Childhood's End, and very much
the same sort of past by remote viewing is a gift of the Overlords, the aliens who have come to
watch over the transformation of mankind.
The truth can also be used to tell a lie, the Brit boys point out, as the storyline follows Kate
through her incarceration on charges trumped up by Hiram. It can be very disquieting to watch the
authors demonstrate that an individual's memory of events is no match for the external record in
this very Orwellian twist. Speaking of truth machines, if you enjoy The Light Of Other Days, you
may also enjoy James Halperin's Truth Machine, which covers some of the same ground from a
different angle, but with much the same style. Even if Halperin is a Yank.
Ultimately the book is about the change to a trans-human world, which is disconcerting because
they convincingly connect the dots between here and there. Artificial telepathy, memory and
cognitive enhancement, hormonal controls, all pretty obvious steps on the road to post-humanity,
but after we are done, will any of the original remain? Does it matter? These have always been
central questions for Clark, and the current book adds food for thought.
Although tame wormhole technology may be a bridge too far for many technologists, a number of
the questions in the book pose themselves just as well if they are posed by technologies rapidly
becoming real. If you wait long enough, the future is bound to become the present. And Sir Arthur
has been waiting patiently for some time.
Stephen Baxter is an excellent writer alone, but I enjoyed his duet with Clarke tremendously. If the
spirit moves them, an encore would be welcome.
Ernest Lilley is the Editor and Publisher of SFRevu, a monthly 'zine for science fiction reviews, news and interviews. It can be found at http://www.sfrevu.com. |
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