The Vicarion

Hunting, Gardner. "The Vicarion." Kansas City, MO: Unity School of Christianity Publishers, 1926/1927.[1][2][3] Discussed in Stephen Baxter's "The Technology of Omniscience: Past Viewers in Science Fiction," our initial source for this entry.

Summary from SF Encyclopedia (JC = John Clute): "the Vicarion, a Time Viewer[4] directed toward the past, which plays back the permanent record of what has been. As a consequence, murders can be solved, politics cleaned up and the true events of history understood at last. [JC]"

Baxter has the mechanism of the device "based on increasing 'the density of ... the etheric substance' (p. 34) on which all events leave a trace." The inventor quickly recognizes the possibilities: "voyerism, the banishment of privacy, the possibility of exposing public figures' murkier moments," which does reduce crime and vice as people are "'frightened into decency' (p. 267)," although the main "impact of the Vicarion," Baxter notes, "is mass entertainment" in "history shows in movie houses." The inventor becomes "a monopolistic mogul" but finally gives his invention to the world, and, in Baxter's words, "we are left to wonder how humanity will cope with the total transparency a Vicarion in every living room will bring" (Baxter pp. 101-02).

Note for theme of surveillance; cf. and contrast such dystopian works as We and The Circle as novel and film; note that such encouragement of decency (etc.) by public exposure is presented as a positive point in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), and implied in the celebration of "transparency" examined in The Circle.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 18Mar19