Flatlander - Larry Niven [153]
More to the point, how can I give you a fair puzzle?
With great difficulty, that’s how. There’s nothing impossible about it. You can trust John Dickson Carr, and me, not to bring a secret passageway into a locked-room mystery. If there’s an X-ray laser involved, I’ll show it to you. If I haven’t shown you an invisible man, there isn’t one. If the ethics of Belt and lunie societies are important, I’ll go into detail on the subject.
Detective and science fiction (and fantasy and police procedural) do have a lot in common. Internal consistency. Readers. All these genres attract readers who like a challenge, a puzzle. Whether it’s the odd disappearance of a weapon (a glass dagger hidden in a flower vase full of water) or the incomprehensibly violent behavior of a visiting alien (he needs a rest room, bad), the question is, What’s going on? The reader is entitled to his chance to out-think the author.
Much detective fiction, and most science fiction, is also sociological fiction. See Asimov’s The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, and Brunner’s Puzzle on Tantalus. Bester’s The Demolished Man is that, and is also an involuted psychological study, a subject well suited to its society of telepaths. Psychological studies are common in crime fiction, too. So are puzzles in basic science, like Asimov’s Wendell Urth stories. Garrett’s Lord Darcy operates in the world of working magic, but the stories are puzzles in internal consistency. Ellery Queen would feel at home with them.
Mystery/sf needed defending once upon a time, back when Hal Clement took up John W. Campbell’s challenge (Needle, with an intelligent parasite/symbiote as detective), but you’re not really in doubt, are you? We could shape a sizable library from detective science fiction. Needle is half a century old, and there are older yet if we include Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” (His murderous ape was more fiction than animal research). Detectives seem to live beyond their stories: Asimov’s Dr. Wendell Urth and Lije Bailey, Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy (fantasy/detective fiction!), and scores of pastiches (particularly stories by Poul Anderson and Gene Wolfe) in which Sherlock Holmes’s niche is taken by aliens, mutants, downloads, artificial intelligences, or robots.
In the mixed marriage of mystery and science fiction there are pitfalls. A 1950s novel of matter duplicators, Double Jeopardy, suffered from internal inconsistency: a coin reversed except for the lettering, a crucial error in multiplication. Edward Hoch writes good tight puzzles, but his near-future mystery The Transection Machine twisted human nature far beyond credibility, merely to make a tighter puzzle.
And me?
I was working on “ARM,” which becomes the third story in this volume, before I ever sold a story. Frederick Pohl (Galaxy) turned down that primitive version. So did John W. Campbell (Analog). What came of that was two letters telling me why mystery/sf is so difficult to write, and what was wrong with “ARM” in particular.
“ARM” needed help. There were too many characters. There were holes in the science, the sociology, the logic. The puzzle grew far too complex.
So I put it away until I could learn more about my craft.
Most of my stories are puzzle stories. Naturally a lot of them become crime and detective stories.
“The Hole Man” involves murder committed with a weapon no normal jury could be expected to understand. “The Meddler” showed a Mike Hammer clone trying to operate with an alien sociologist at his elbow. “The Tale of the Genie and the Sisters” showed Scheherazade in a detective role. “All the Myriad Ways” was a crime story about quantum mechanics. “The Deadlier Weapon