Private Eye

Kuttner, Henry. "Private Eye." Astounding, Jan. 1949. Rpt. Patricia S. Warrick et al., eds. Science Fiction: The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology. New York, Harper, 1988.

In the world of the story, the forces of law and order possess "a device for looking into the past." It's "limited to a fifty-year span" but within that span it is "sensitive enough to pick up the 'fingerprints' of light and sound waves imprinted on matter, descramble and screen them, and reproduce the image of what had happened," and the sound (SFRA [207]). And in this world of extreme surveillance, a man manages to get away with a murder.

Cited, contextualized, and discussed briefly in Stephen Baxter's "The Technology of Omniscience: Past Viewers in Science Fiction", pp. 103-04.

(RDE, 25/08/99) Expanded slightly RDE, Initial Compiler, 19Mar19