I am really on a roll with reading. I finished another book last night. That's 3 books in a little over a week. I am not sure if it counts though because I have read it before.

I got a book at the library on Thursday. I read 10 pages and it was horrible. I usually give a book 50-100 pages just in case, but this book was just lame. From the book jacket it seemed interesting. It was a story about a guy who lost his girlfriend and through her death he becomes a Zombie. Part of the problem was this book was a sequel (I didn't read book 1) and the author didn't do a really good job of introducing the characters.

So anyway, Thursday night I didn't have anything to read so I went over to my little library and tried to find something I haven't read in a while. I bumped into one of my favorite books ever published and knew I had to read it again. The book is The Light Of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. The book is great in that it deal with worm holes from a scientific perspective, but it doesn't get bogged down in Quantum Theory/Mechanics. I've read a number of other books by Stephen Baxter, but only books where he collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke can I stomach (The Time Odyssey series is also pretty good).

What I like about The Light of Other Days is that it talks about a future technology that changes the world in the same way that Radio, TV, and the Internet changed life. The book is set mostly in the 2030s where man harnesses the ability to open small worm holes. First the technology is used for practicality. Transmitting video signals from one side of the earth to the other gets bogged down in data transmission lag caused by the constant of the speed of light. Hiram Patterson, a wealthy tycoon who runs the media company Our World, wants to do transmissions with no delay. Worm holes get around the delay. The technology evolves for other useful applications and that is where the story really gets interesting.

The book was published in 2000 and you can really see the influence of the emerging Internet in the scope of the emerging technology. There is even a reference to the "Internet Gold Rush" at the turn of the century. Where the authors took the story though makes the Internet really an afterthought. People in this world have implants and wearable tech that's Net connected. They can just say "Search Engine: foo" and the expert systems can tell by the context that you are making a query about foo. This kind of technology is probably doable in these times, but in this future world it is commonplace.

For anybody who is any bit technically inclined, I totally recommend the novel.

It is probably redundant to say, but I give the book 4 our of 4 stars.