Other days, other eyes
Slow glass was an amusing scientific toy. Light traveled through it so slowly that, looking through a pane of it, you might see what had happened five minutes ago on the other side--or five years. It stopped being a toy when great new jeliners began to crash, caraccidents multiplied astronomically and a mounting toll of deaths and disasters revealed its true potential. And it was no toy at all when blackmailers discovered how to use it to see into the secret life of any victim--and government officials found it could permit surveillance of any person, any time, anywhere.
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- "Light of Other Days"/"Other Days, Other Eyes" by Bob Shaw is much closer - and poignant - take on that idea.
- Interesting. This idea appears pretty much exactly at the end of Bob Shaw's 1972 SFnal collection Other Days, Other Eyes. The starting premise is the invention of "slow glass" that looks like an irrelevant gimmick but ends up revolutionizing all sorts of things, and the final bits envisage a disturbing surveillance society with these tiny passive cameras spread everywhere.
It's a good read; I don't think the extrapolation of one technical advance has ever been done better.
- It's not a new consideration; Bob Shaw’s 1972 book Other Days, Other Eyes does a credible job of looking at a world with ubiquitous recording - a cheap dust like recording medium is crop dusted across entire countries with the result that it can be hoovered up and played back to show whatever took place in the vicinity.
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/10/slow-glass-seen-from-all-ar...
