The Light of Other Days

Christopher Columbus (1996). One of us has briefly sketched its implications in previous works (Childhood’s End, 1953, “The Parasite,” 1953). Perhaps the best-known and best-example is Bob Shaw’s “slow glass” classic which shares our title (Analog, August 1966).

Today the notion has the first glimmers of scientific plausibility, offered by modern physics — and a resonance with our own times, surrounded as we are increasingly by the apparatus of surveillance.

The concept of spacetime wormholes is well described in Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (W. W. Norton, 1994). The proposal that wormholes might be generated by “squeezing the vacuum” was set out by David Hochberg and Thomas Kephart (Physics Letters B, vol. 268, pp. 377-383, 1991).

The very speculative and, we hope, respectful reconstruction of the historical life of Jesus Christ is largely drawn from A. N. Wilson’s fine biography Jesus (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992). For assistance with the passages on Abraham Lincoln the authors are indebted to Warren Allen Smith, New York correspondent of Gay and Lesbian Humanist (UK).

The idea that primitive Earth was afflicted by savage glacial episodes has been proposed by Paul Hoffman of Harvard University and his coworkers (see Science, vol. 281, p. 1342, 28 August 1998). And the notion that primitive life might have survived Earth’s early bombardment by sheltering deep underground is explored, for example, in Paul Davies’ The Fifth Miracle (Penguin, 1998).

Thanks are due to Andy Sawyer of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection, Sydney Jones Library, Liverpool University, for his assistance with research, and to Edward James of Reading University and to Eric Brown for reading drafts of the manuscript. Any errors or omissions are, of course, our responsibility.

This book, of its nature, contains a great deal of speculation on historical figures and events. Some of this is reasonably well founded on current historical sources, some of it is at the remoter fringe of respectable theorizing, and some of it is little more than the authors’ own wild imaginings. We leave it as an exercise to the reader to sort out which is which, in the anticipation that we are not likely to be proven wrong until the invention of the WormCam itself.