The novel “Other Days, Other Eyes” by Bob Shaw was published for the first time in 1972.
Alban Garrod invented a particularly strong crystal but only after a series of strange accidents with cars that use it and a near tragedy with an airplane that uses it he realizes its true uniqueness: when light passes through it, it seems to slow down dramatically.
This discovery marks the opening to a series of new applications for what soon is commonly called “slow glass” but also to problems. A sheet of slow glass can “record” a landscape that can be seen later as if it were a window. If a criminal acts in front of slow glass he can be nailed by that evidence when the images come across it. However, everything that’s done in front of slow glass can be potentially spied on.
In 1966, Bob Shaw published the short story “Light of Other Days”, which introduced slow glass, a type of glass that light takes a time that can be very long to cross. The following year, Shaw published another story on the same subject, “Burden of Proof”. Later, Bob Shaw wrote the story of the inventor of slow glass which, along with the two original stories, composed the novel “Other Days, Other Eyes”.
Slow glass is Bob Shaw’s most famous idea and “Other Days, Other Eyes” became his most famous novel. It seems to contain all the writer’s typical elements: there’s an invention and the novel follows its developments and its consequences, in this case mainly on society.
“Other Days, Other Eyes” shows various possible applications of slow glass but also its dangers for privacy for the chance to use it to spy on someone. Reread today, the novel is in this sense quite prophetic: slow glass doesn’t exist, though there are some research trying to produce something like that, but the presence of cameras, even very small, is becoming common everywhere with consequences similar to those seen in the novel.
Another element of “Other Days, Other Eyes” which appears in several stories by Bob Shaw is the complicated relationship of the protagonist with his wife. In this case, the inventor of slow glass Alban Garrod married Esther, who comes from a wealthy family and for this reason he received from his father in law the funding he needed in order to create the crystal later known as slow glass.
Garrod is basically controlled by his wife because of this financial dependence. When the Thermgard, as the crystal he created is originally called, reveals its slow glass properties and its name gets changed to Retardite, Garrod earns so much money that he becomes richer than his father in law. That changes his relationship with his wife but not as much as he’d like. Wives are often negative characters in Bob Shaw’s stories but in those cases husbands don’t seem strong enough to dump them and move on with their lives.
Another element of the novel very common in Bob Shaw’s stories is connected to vision. Slow glass is in fact the essential component of a device that allows people afflicted with certain types of blindness to see the image “recorded” in it.
“Other Days, Other Eyes” works well because it’s a kind of concentrated of Bob Shaw but it’s not perfect. The story takes place over several years, a very long time for a novel well under two hundred pages. At that time there were already very long science fiction novels but they were the exception while Shaw’s novels followed the standard of their time.
In theory, the fact that “Other Days, Other Eyes” is basically fragmented in various episodes with the original stories unrelated to the main plot is a fault. In general, such a choice weakens a novel, also because inevitably Alban Garrod and his wife are by far the best developed characters. However, considering the fact that the true protagonist is slow glass in this particular case this choice becomes almost a virtue.
Overall, I think “Other Days, Other Eyes” is an excellent novel that I recommend to everyone, especially to anyone who wants to get to know Bob Shaw.
