As sci-fi novels go, Eye in the Sky is not particularly futuristic, catapulting the reader forward a mere two years, yet also light years in terms of technology and what the human race is scientifically capable of. Let's face it: if someone offered us the opportunity to time travel, but then told us we'd be going just twenty four months into the future, we would probably turn them down, and, all things considered, believe it was much safer to wait and see for ourselves in the natural course of time.
However, the tiny little jump forwards in time in this novel is less about time exploration and more about making the point that if 1950s man was not very careful, and the galloping force of McCarthyism not reigned in a little bit, then the events that take place in the book could very well happen, if not in actuality then certainly metaphorically. The main character in the novel has recently lost his job because of a rumor that his wife is politically left-leaning. Nobody seems to be interested in his own political beliefs; they don't seem to matter very much. He works in a science-based environment that is naturally very careful about keeping its secrets close to the vest, and an association with a suspected Communist sympathizer is all that it takes for his life to be up-ended and his livelihood taken away.
There is also a secondary warning in the novel, and that is that left-wing sympathizers are not going to announce themselves. Nobody can be trusted. A case in point? Charles McFeyffe, who was the source of the rumor about Hamilton's wife, was actually the Communist agent, determined to infiltrate companies whose secrets could help him, and to spread the scourge of Communism as quickly as possible.
Although the title phrase, "the eye in the sky", refers to the enormous eye of God that Hamilton and McFeyffe see when they travel into the reality of Heaven, it can equally refer to the contention in the novel that everyone is being watched at all times. This also relates to McFeyffe as the security chief who is ostensibly checking into backgrounds to weed out lefties. At the time of the publication of the book, there was a great deal of suspicion that the government was watching its citizens far more than had ever been realized before. There is an air of paranoia in the book, not just in terms of the alternate paranoid delusion reality that the tour group briefly live in, but in the tone of the novel in which nobody trusts anybody, and for good reason.
