(Found) SF Story: Author & Name?

[northernexposure]

A man invents a device that can see anywhere, distributes its plans, and uses a convoluted method to arrange that he will not be discovered until after his death. Another knob on the device allows one to look back in time. By the end of the story, anyone can see what anyone else is doing or has ever done. The finale has researchers following bee evolution back through time. Working on a paper about universal transparency, and this would be helpful. Thanks--

 

[Danny McG]

Arthur C Clarke & Stephen Baxter "The light of other days"

The Light of Other Days - Wikipedia

 

[GCJ]

Stephen baxter popped straight in to my head. Turns out he wrote it based on an Arthur C Clarke outline. It's been a long time since I read that book, but if I recall it was a really nice piece.

Thought provoking.

 

[northernexposure]

Thanks, but this is not the story. I will look into this one as well - especially since I seem to have missed this Baxter novel (unusual). It also does not seem to be the earlier Clarke story ("The Dead Past"), but I am grateful that you have pointed this route out to me.

 

[Dennis E. Taylor]

Huh. I also thought "Light of Other Days" based on your description. It'll be interesting, if you get the answer, to compare them.

 

[Danny McG]

I presume it's not a straightforward Chronoscope story like the ones here
Time viewer - Wikipedia

Any more details you can recall?
Usual stuff like approx when did you read it and was it a newish book at the time?
Why bee evolution? Was there a specific main plot detail for that?

 

[northernexposure]

Thanks for the link! I bet that it is the Damon Knight 1976 story, "I see you," which was listed therein. And I will definitely find out. It was Hugo-nominated. I thought that it was a 1990's story, but I could well have read it then. In the meantime, I found a short review of the story on youtube:

Thanks!

 

[northernexposure]

Found!

Faster than I would have believed, I received a copy of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1976, completely devoted to Damon Knight. And the first story, “I See You,” is indeed the story that I was searching for. And the part about bees? It was toward the end of the story and was an example of what this time viewer could do, other than see what neighbors and forerunners did behind closed doors:

Using the tracer, an entomologist in Mexico City is following the ancestral line of a honey bee. The images bloom and expire, ten every second: the tracer is following each queen back to the egg, then the egg to the queen that laid it, then that queen to the egg. Tens of thousands of generations have passed; in two thousand hours, beginning with a Paleocene bee, he has traveled back into the Cretaceous. He stops at intervals to follow the bee in real time, then accelerates again. The hive is growing smaller, more primitive. Now it is only a cluster of round cells, and the bee is different, more like a wasp. His year’s labor is coming to fruition. He watches, forgetting to eat, almost to breathe. (p. 14).

Thanks for your help in finding this!

 

[Dennis E. Taylor]

That is so much like "The Light of Other Days!" Really brings it home that very few plots are truly original.