A passive form of Time Machine which typically displays, but allows no interaction, with scenes from the past. Gardner Hunting's The Vicarion (1926; exp 1927) is an early example in which the viewer is used for both crime-solving (> Crime and Punishment) and entertainment. Another is J W Chancellor's Through the Visograph (1928), whose titular device penetrates a vast Time Abyss to reveal a civilization now millions of years gone. The viewer in Before the Dawn (1934) by John Taine shows the passing of the Dinosaurs. Similar devices channel history in H Bedford-Jones's 1930s story series Trumpets from Oblivion, rationalizing various myths and legends, and its 1940s successor Counterclockwise. Though far from central to the narrative, time viewers are employed to debunk Religion in Childhood's End (April 1950 Famous Fantastic Mysteries as "Guardian Angel"; much exp 1953; rev 1990) by Arthur C Clarke.
There is a sense in which all astronomy is time-viewing, owing to the limiting speed of light. Thus Faster Than Light travel might take an observer to a location light-years from Earth, allowing – at least in theory – the study of past events whose images are still arriving via old light. This gimmick is used to view the life of Christ in Around a Distant Star (1904) by Jean Delaire, and to reveal events a month past in Skylark Three (August-October 1930 Amazing; 1948) by E E Smith, where it is also suggested that the technique could "photograph the actual construction of the pyramids of Egypt". Piers Anthony's Macroscope (1969) goes further, using not light but ancient "macron" particles which have circled the galaxy many times, allowing the formation of our solar system to be observed.
One variation on the theme posits a time listener rather than a time viewer, a device to pick up old sounds as in Florence McLandburgh's "The Automaton Ear" (May 1873 Scribner's Monthly). This concept is echoed in J G Ballard's "The Sound-Sweep" (February 1960 Science Fantasy) and literalized in Gregory Benford's "Time Shards" (in Universe 9, anth 1979, ed Terry Carr), which without any actual Time Travel mechanism imagines ancient sounds recorded via fine work on a potter's wheel and recoverable from the ceramic surface by modern Technology.
An inevitable sf insight is that a machine capable of viewing any past time and location can effectively spy on the present world of seconds or microseconds ago (> Spy-Rays). One pioneering story of this kind is "The Time Eliminator" (December 1926 Amazing) by "Kaw": after brief glimpses of history, the viewer's inventor sees the potential for present-day espionage. In T L Sherred's "E for Effort" (May 1947 Astounding), the realization that national secrets will no longer exist triggers World War Three to ensure the time viewer's suppression. "Private Eye" (January 1949 Astounding) by Lewis Padgett (> Henry Kuttner and C L Moore) centres on a murderer who ingeniously plans his crime to seem innocent to a time viewer's scrutiny. Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past" (April 1956 Astounding) ends with the horrified revelation that the release of "chronoscope" technology has ended privacy forever. Similar gloom pervades the close of Bob Shaw's Slow Glass novel Other Days, Other Eyes (fixup 1972), with particles of image-capturing glass spread by crop-duster planes in order to render the entire environment subject to police and state interrogation. Damon Knight responded to these Dystopian visions with "I See You" (November 1976 F&SF), where universal ownership of viewers has eliminated most human embarrassments and neuroses to produce an unnerving (to us) glass-walled Utopia. Also, since light is energy, the Knight variety of viewer can logically be adapted to extract free power from the Sun (> Power Sources).
Such interaction with the past implies viewers which are no longer passive but can interfere with history. Historical figures observed in Horace Gold's "The Biography Project" (September 1951 Galaxy) are driven to Paranoia by the unseen scrutiny of the time viewer; John Wyndham's "Pawley's Peepholes" (Summer 1951 Suspense as "Operation Peep"; vt Winter 1951/1952 Science Fantasy) satirizes intrusive tourism as privacy is violated by visible though intangible future time-voyeurs; in David Langford's "The Final Days" (Winter 1981 Destinies) a person's importance to futurity may be inferred from the level of time-viewer attention detected by instruments. Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996) moves from purely observational use of the "Tempoview" device to realization that it can be deliberately employed to change the past – at which point the viewer merges into the wider sense of Time Machines. The same is true of the time viewer in the film Déjà Vu (2006).
Further sf novels featuring time viewers include Blood Brothers (1996) by Steven Barnes and The Light of Other Days (2000) by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter. The latter explores all the familiar avenues including privacy issues, study of deep time, and free power; it additionally posits that the viewer can map and recreate the minds of the dead, pre-empting Frank Tipler (1947- ) and his vision of the Omega Point.
Devices that see into the future rather than the past appear less frequently. Examples include John R Pierce's "Pre-Vision" (March 1936 Astounding) and Lord Dunsany's The Pleasures of a Futuroscope (written 1955; 2003). The same general principle features in more restricted devices such as the moment-of-death predictor in Robert A Heinlein's "Life-Line" (August 1939 Astounding) and the Dirac Communicator introduced by James Blish in "Beep" (February 1954 Galaxy; exp as The Quincunx of Time 1973). Viewing the future inevitably raises questions of free will versus determinism. [DRL]
see also: Time Radio.
further reading
- Stephen Baxter. "The Technology of Omniscience: Past Viewers in Science Fiction" (Autumn 2000 Foundation #80) [pp97-107: mag/]
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