Book clubs and discussion groups are going to feast on "The Light of Other Days." Though it is only middlingly successful as a novel, it's extraordinarily rich in ideas, for which Arthur C. Clarke ("2001: A Space Odyssey," "Rendezvous With Rama") and Stephen Baxter ("The Time Ships") construct plausible scientific underpinnings.
For example: What if human beings lost all their privacy forever? In the 2030s, Seattle-based entrepreneur Hiram Patterson, the Bill Gates of his era, invents the WormCam. At a certain subatomic level of matter, tiny "wormholes" open up momentarily in the "quantum foam," connecting any given point in space with any other. Patterson's technicians, including his sons, David and Bobby, enlarge and stabilize these wormholes so that people can see through them.
Patterson's aims are strictly mercenary. He owns a CNN-type news organization and wants to scoop his rivals without the expense of maintaining reporters and photographers around the globe. But the WormCam, once his firm and the government no longer monopolize it, proves to have much broader implications.
The world becomes transparent. Military and corporate secrecy vanish. Unfaithful spouses, charlatans and criminals are exposed. No bodily functions can be hidden. The 5th Amendment is meaningless. People must learn to live with the possibility of being spied on at every moment, just as the devout have believed themselves to be under the eye of God.
Is this catastrophe or utopia? Clarke and Baxter could have been satisfied with giving us that much to argue about--considering how nervous we are about current surveillance technology--but they're just getting warmed up.
Never mind that a space rock 400 kilometers across has beendiscovered on a collision course with Earth. It will hit only 500 years hence, with a force many times greater than that of the comet that killed off the dinosaurs--casting the value of all human progress, including the WormCam, in doubt.
And never mind the thriller plot that involves Patterson, his megalomania, his sons' mysterious parentage and journalist Kate Manzoni, who becomes Bobby's lover against the old man's wishes. That's just a container, hardly more substantial than Styrofoam, for the scientific and historical speculation.
