Worried about pervasive surveillance?  About how much ammunition your 7th-grade MySpace posts and AIM logs will provide to the opposition when you run for office, or interview for a job?  Check out the highly underrated The Light of Other Days, joint venture of science fiction giants Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.

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Arthur C. Clarke needs no introduction.  I consider Baxter more or less to be Clarke’s more operatic successor, he started publishing in the early 1990s and still writes.  If you’re familiar with Clarke but not Baxter, check out their jointly-written short story The Wire Continuum (a take-off on Clarke’s first published story, Travel by Wire!; the two stories neatly bookend Clarke’s Collected Stories).

TLoOD has a simple conceit: a machine can create a microscopic camera at any arbitrary point in space.  Initially, this machine is very large, but it gets smaller to the point that an individual can easily afford one.  Also, someone realizes that the wormhole-creating technology can just as easily form camera apertures at any point in (past) time.  The book explains the mechanics of the wormhole-creating device in some detail although I have no basis to judge accuracy or plausibility.

The narratively convenient progression of “WormCam” capabilities allows the authors to examine the possible effects of instant, pervasive surveillance in different ways.  Of course, governments initially use the tech for “national security” purposes before seamlessly moving to petty political tricks (e.g. embarrassing videos of the incumbent’s challenger).  As the WormCam proliferates, a panopticon forms, somewhat along the lines of David Brin’s ideal in The Transparent Society although without any privacy norms — indeed privacy becomes obsolete, although not overnight.  Some individuals attempt to escape surveillance through a variety of often extreme means; these efforts come to nothing once engineers perfect the temporal mode.

The book focuses, in my opinion unnecessarily and ineptly, on certain details of history.  Of course the observers carefully catalogue the past.  A token Christian abandons the faith after viewing live footage of the Crusades, of all things, though that may have been in conjunction with proof of the non-divinity of Jesus.  While this sort of preaching is standard Clarke, he and Baxter are in much better form writing about the discovery of an advanced trilobite civilization existing on Earth billions of years ago.

TLoOD’s ultimate conclusion — that humans can learn to get along just fine without secrets or privacy whatsoever — depends strongly on the democratization of surveillance tools (again, echoing Brin).  The book doesn’t ever deal very seriously with the prospect of a highly capital-intensive absolute surveillance tool, and not at all with the efforts such a tool’s beneficiary might make to ensure it stays just the way they like it.  As such, TLoOD has only limited applicability to the world we live in now.  Clarke always and Baxter often have difficulty portraying (understanding?) individuals or organizations truly obsessed with power over others.  The ultimate progression of the WormCam reflects their own philosophy of technology as a liberating and educating force more than a serious consideration of technical possibility.

Still, a fascinating concept, and despite the book being a solid entry in both authors’ catalogues I rarely see it recommended even to readers specifically interested in either author.  As expected, the book has the standard cutout characters and indifferent plot lines typical of both authors, who are always at their strongest writing a worksheet on a good SF conceit.  The Light of Other Days has that in spades.