| Arthur C Clarke |
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Stephen Baxter |
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First published by Voyager (a Harper Collins imprint), 2000 March 1. Published in the USA by Tor Books.
Very few readers will not know of Arthur C Clarke - justly famous for 2001, A Space Odyssey. Just as importantly, he produced a significant number of SF novels and short stories of high quality from the late 1940s through to the 1970s. Sadly, although he has never stopped writing, I have found most of this later output to fall short of the standard of the glorious earlier work. Stories such as the outstanding Childhood's End are SF classics, which transcend the "SF" label and can be ranked alongside the best of popular non-SF literature. So much for the first-named of the two authors. Sadly, I have virtually nothing to add about Stephen Baxter, other than to say I've never read any of his other books.
The film 2001 spawned a novel, which itself spawned a series of sequels. It seems to me that The Light Of Other Days is a book which hopes to spawn a film. Many scenes appear to be written as descriptions of fairly vivid imagery which would work as images, but don't convince when read, as I found myself wondering just how the imagery would be produced. While SF usually includes technology or science invented by the author, for the story to work this invention has to be at least self-consistent. The key development powering the plot of The Light Of Other Days is the "WormCam", a way of transmitting images instantly via the wormholes which constantly form and collapse in the "quantum foam" forming the Universe at its smallest and most elemental level. Depending on which page of the book one is reading, the enlarged and stabilised wormholes used by a WormCam either require elaborate supporting technology, or are trivially easy to produce. WormCams are either limited in number to perhaps a few hundred, or present in their millions. I found such inconsistencies irritating and distracting. The WormCam is invented and developed by OneWorld (there are plenty of these compound names), the global news and entertainment empire headed by Hiram Patterson. After some initial use for both serious and frivolous journalistic exposées, WormCam becomes a profoundly disruptive technology, affecting the way most people live. These two aspects are shown in the extracts, which provide almost the sum of the book's references to non-sexual nudity.
As I think is clear in the extracts, Clarke and Baxter (to be fair, the characters they write about) belong to the "body beautiful" school of permissible nudity. Delightful young nudes are fine, as are well-preserved ladies with conventional good looks. But flabby and wrinkly old naturists are offensive. Overall, this book offers little or nothing in the way of insights into attitudes to social nudity, and it falls well short of the quality of many other books by Clarke. If you see a copy in your library, by all means see what you think, but if you are considering buying a book, there are many others on this site which should provide much more stimulus, interest and entertainment.
Ratings:
| Nudity | Naturist nudity | A good read? |
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Last updated 2004 April 3.
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