Flatlander - Larry Niven [154]
These aside, I generally write more than one story within any imaginary world. It isn’t laziness. Honest! It’s just that, having designed a detailed, believable, even probable future, I often find that I have more to say about it than will fit in a story.
So it comes about that Gil the ARM lives and works in the 2120s of the “known space” line of history, whose story bulks at a million words as of this writing, including stories by other authors (within the Man-Kzin Wars volumes) and a half-written novel, The Ringworld Throne. Most of these novels and short stories take place in human space, thirty light-years across, but lines of development include the Ringworld (200 light-years galactic north) and the galactic core (33,000 light-years toward Sagitarius.) For crime stories set later in “known space,” see the Beowulf Shaeffer stories in Crashlander.
Five sociological stories that are also crime stories took place along another timeline, the world of JumpShift, Inc., and “Flash Crowd.” The assumption is that teleportation was perfected in the 1980s, and by the 1990s a network of instant-transportation booths has spread across the world. Alibis disappear, and a new kind of killer appears. He’s the guy who would otherwise have moved away by now. Instead he finds himself living next door (effectively) to his boss and his business rival and his ex-spouse and the guy who has owed him thirty bucks for six years and denies it. Where can he go? So he kills.
Footfall, written with Jerry Pournelle, includes a murder puzzle among the alien invaders of Earth, though the Herdmaster’s Advisor isn’t even dead until a hundred thousand words into the book. By then you should know the fithp well enough to guess who, and how, and why.
Ten years after my first try, with several crime/sf stories in print, I was ready to have another look at “ARM.”
“ARM” looked bad. I had to rewrite from scratch. I saved what I could: some nice descriptions, including the surreal murder scene, a couple of characters, and the strongest bones in the plot skeleton. I took out some verbal thrashing about in bizarre restaurants. Gil the ARM replaced Lucas Garner onstage. I took out an irrelevant nightmare, and a coin-operated surgeon device capable of implanting the bud of a new organ: wrong era, and it made things too easy for the killer. I took out the FyreStop device, which killed by suppressing chemical reactions: a fun thing, but unnecessary, and it complicated the bejeesus out of the plot. Losing that cost me three or four suspects, and good riddance.
(But look for excellent handling of the FyreStop idea in The D.A.G.G.E.R. Affair, an old Man from U.N.C.L.E. story by David McDaniel.)
When I showed the result to Jerry Pournelle, he made me rewrite it. He also showed me where the organleggers came in.
In general, then, I corrected the flaws John Campbell and Frederick Pohl had pointed out. I wish Campbell had lived to see “ARM.”
How likely is Gil Hamilton’s future?
I don’t see how we can avoid the crowding or the rigid, dictatorial population control without the blessing of a major war or plague. As for the conquest of the solar system, one can hope. And as for the UN organ banks …
One of my oldest stories, “The Jigsaw Man” laid out the basis of the organ bank problem. If Jeffrey Dahmer had been executed in a hospital, disassembled like a jigsaw puzzle, he could have saved as many lives as he took. So can any adult who has committed a capital crime. Or any child whose crime is deemed to be adultlike … and hey, kids are committing a lot of murders these days, and wouldn’t you rather have a fifteen-year-old’s organs than an elderly Charles Manson’s? If that approach still leaves the Red Cross needing whole blood and patients crying for eyes and kidneys, then Rush Limbaugh and John Bobbitt are constantly violating principles of political correctness. And what about the guy who thinks he can ruin a wetlands just because he paid for the land?
Where do we stop?
Ever since publication of “The Jigsaw Man,”