ate Manzoni is a leading investigative reporter who made her reputation exposing the cover-up of the discovery that a massive comet is on a path to collide with Earth in 500 years. Now she has been invited to a major announcement by Hiram Patterson, CEO of the corporate giant OurWorld. Patterson's announcement includes the demonstration of a new technology, the Casimir Engine, which can stabilize wormholes so that they can be used as communications portals without time delays.
After initially rebuffing Patterson's playboy son, Bobby, Manzoni finally accepts his invitation to dinner as a way to gain access to his father. She and Bobby form a close friendship that develops into a relationship. Patterson eventually learns the extent of the secrets Manzoni has obtained, and Bobby convinces his father that the best way to keep Manzoni quiet is to hire her. However, Patterson disapproves of the relationship and he and Manzoni share a mutual distrust.
Meanwhile, Patterson brings his other son, David, a brilliant physicist, on board to further develop the wormhole technology. Before long, David has improved it so that stable wormholes can be opened between any two points in space. They call the device the WormCam. OurWorld immediately puts it to use in its media operations, while keeping the extent to which it has been developed a closely held secret. But when Manzoni reports on a secret conversation between the U.S. president and the British prime minister about the possibility of a water war between England and Scotland, the FBI becomes interested.
OurWorld makes a deal to give the government access to the technology, but Patterson is furious with Manzoni. Improvements in the WormCam have made it possible to look into the past as well as the present, enabling new possibilities in everything from historical research to crime-solving. And soon after evidence emerges that one of OurWorld's competitors has the technology, the FBI makes a return visit to accuse OurWorld of industrial sabotage. And Manzoni is the prime suspect.
Radical, not quite transcendent
In The Light of Other Days, Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter have attempted to meld the story of a powerful but dysfunctional family with the implications of a new technology that will radically change the way people live and think. They don't perfectly succeed in either thread, but they come close enough in both to make this a fascinating and engaging novel. Although they never quite arrive at the profound philosophical revelations it seems the book is aiming at, they do present some wonderful surprises, including a whole chapter on the "real" life story of Jesus, which is respectfully done while differing significantly from familiar accounts. An even more impressive chapter occurs near the end of the book, after they learn to use the WormCam to trace DNA back through generations. Bobby and David trace theirs back to the origins of life, covering all of evolution, and make a startling discovery.
Although using an evil CEO character has become trite, Clarke and Baxter pull it off. Patterson is a complicated villain. His manipulations always have a rational purpose, even if his goals are less than admirable. Manzoni, meanwhile, provides a strong-willed, complex adversary, and their conflict (with Bobby in the middle) is the main force driving the plot. The exploration of the implications of the new technology, by contrast, is less fully developed. The despair and the rebellion caused by the WormCams is conveyed very effectively, however. Speculation on the loss of privacy and the revisions to history are quite interesting and entertaining. Perhaps most fascinating is the direct connection between minds which the WormCams allow, leading to an underground community of shared consciousness.
While it's fairly easy to see where The Light of Other Days might be improved, it's still quite a good book. It's a worthy effort from two of the finest hard SF writers in the world.
I wish Clarke and Baxter had chosen to frame the book's conflicts around the loss of privacy and joining of minds, rather than around Patterson's manipulations. I think the transcendental themes they seem to be aiming for would have emerged a lot more effectively.
-- Clint
n the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories collects 16 tales that first appeared in publications ranging from Asimov's Science Fiction to Playboy. The stories themselves are equally diverse in style and subject matter.
The title story, published in altered form in Bisson's 1996 novel Pirates of the Universe, details the misadventures of a virtual-reality sojourner. It sets the tone for the rest of the book, with its satirical edge and strange obsession with ladies' undergarments. Irving and Wu, from the 1994 story "The Hole in the Hole," return in two tales. The duo have a knack for stumbling upon space-time anomalies in unlikely places, such as Huntsville, Alabama, where the Big Bang is going into reverse.
In "The Joe Show," a woman learns that males are all alike, even hyperintelligent clouds of interstellar plasma. Time travel and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman figure in "Incident at Oak Ridge," written in screenplay form.
The title says it all in "Tell Them They Are Full of Shit and They Should Fuck Off." In this story humanity proves unprepared for the first message from an alien race.
"An Office Romance" depicts a future in which familiar workplace software has evolved into a complete virtual environment. Ken679 is initiated into love and rebellion when he meets Mary97, whose icon has features not on the Options Menu. The story's neo-Orwellian scenario shows that imposing mass conformity
doesn't require brutality and surveillance, just a comfortable user
interface.
Tales of deceptive simplicity
Bisson spins tales of deceptive simplicity, using sparse prose and sketching characters with broad but deft strokes. His use of repetition evokes campfire stories and Grimm's fairy tales. Some stories, such as "Smoother," consist entirely of dialogue. But Bisson is no minimalist, for his fiction is generously endowed with sharp wit, dead-on dialogue and the storytelling gifts of a born raconteur.
Occasionally Bisson's writing achieves an uncharacteristic lushness and his cynicism gives way to a bittersweet, elegiac nostalgia in stories such as "There Are No Dead." Bisson's politics come to the fore in the darkest and potentially most controversial story, "macs," (a 1999 Hugo Award nominee) which suggests society's pursuit of justice has become an ugly quest for vengeance. The book's final entry is "Not This Virginia," from the literary journal Southern Exposure, a story that is neither science fiction nor fantasy. A fitting ending to the book, it abruptly returns both readers and the story's characters to reality.
The eloquent descriptions of ladies' undergarments that appear in several stories makes one wonder if Bisson once wrote catalogue copy for Victoria's Secret. Bisson finds poetry in the language of lingerie, and reveals more about the modern male libido than most explicit erotica.
In the Upper Room isn't quite as strong as Bisson's previous collection, Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories. The Irving and Wu stories are fun, but eventually their shtick wears a little thin. By any other standard, however, this is an outstanding collection. Even the stories that don't quite work are at least interesting and usually funny.
I enjoy reading Bisson's stories aloud to my wife. They make good bedtime stories for those who like their dreams weird.
-- Curt
ate Manzoni is a leading investigative reporter who made her reputation exposing the cover-up of the discovery that a massive comet is on a path to collide with Earth in 500 years. Now she has been invited to a major announcement by Hiram Patterson, CEO of the corporate giant OurWorld. Patterson's announcement includes the demonstration of a new technology, the Casimir Engine, which can stabilize wormholes so that they can be used as communications portals without time delays.
n the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories collects 16 tales that first appeared in publications ranging from Asimov's Science Fiction to Playboy. The stories themselves are equally diverse in style and subject matter.
