Alban Garrod is an engineer who has designed the windshield for a new supersonic jet. On the day of the plane's test flight, he is driving to the airfield when he is nearly involved in an accident with a sports car. Disaster is only avoided because the driver of the sports car instinctively but inexplicably slows down. When the jet's maiden flight later ends in a minor crash landing, Garrod realizes that the two accidents are linked. Both the windscreen of the automobile he encountered on the road and that of the plane are made of the same glass he has created - Thermgard. Investigating his invention, Garrod discovers that Thermgard is more than just a durable material for windows: it is slow glass, capable of arresting the speed of light passing through it far more than ordinary glass ever could. Eager to escape his wife's constant reminders that he is sheltering under the wing of her father's fortune, Garrod takes out a patent of his own. Slow glass will make Garrod rich and will alter the world forever, having implications for society that its inventor never imagined.

An outstanding example of a novel whose plot and characters are almost entirely driven by the affects of a unique scientific novelty (the classic Campbellian blueprint for traditional SF), Other Days, Other Eyes is a strikingly thoughtful and introspective novel. Its most elegiac section is one of the 'sidelight' stories that provide intervals in the main narrative. In it, panels of slow glass are set up in front of countryside views for years. Because of its special properties, slow glass retains images of the past and the panels can be sold as windows that will allow urban buyers to enjoy the vistas at home yet they continue to record events that are gone but not forgotten by both the farmer whose lands supply the views and his customers. Bob Shaw hailed from Northern Ireland and was the best hard SF writer in the UK during his career. Despite being very different from the New Wave authors who dominated British genre writing at the time, his best work always had the readable qualities embodied by the likes of John Wyndham. Other Days, Other Eyes is consequently essential reading not only for devotees of ideas-led SF, but for anyone who enjoys good fiction.

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