I'm not quite sure what I'm doing with this column yet. Here are a couple of books I've had papers published in.
Books mentioned
Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov (1953)
"Neutron Star", a short story by Larry Niven.
Profiles of the Future, by Arthur C. Clarke
Rocket to the Morgue, by Anthony Boucher (1942)
Stories of Gil the ARM, by Larry Niven
See Also
If haven't read Niven's "Known Space" stories, The Incompleat Known Space Concordance has a great web site to help you get started: What to Read First". It all starts of course with Neutron Star.
Larry Niven's "Neutron Star" as Detective Fiction
Note, we refer here to the short story. There is also a book, Neutron Star, a story collection which includes this short.Larry Niven's short story "Neutron Star", forty years old as of this writing, is justly famous in science fiction. Winner of the Hugo award, and of the 1999 Locus poll for All Time Best novelette, it introduces the character of Beowulf Shaeffer, space pilot, as well as the alien species Pierson's Puppeteers, both of which would reappear many times in Niven's subsequent "Known Space" fiction.
I have read and re-read "Neutron Star" many times. When I turned to writing science fiction, I spent a week analyzing the story in detail as a structural model for a story that also featured a close rendezvous with a star. I was young(er) and unskilled then; I missed a lot. More recently, rereading it yet again, a key secret struck me. Yes, it's an SF story. It's also detective fiction.
The history of SF detective fiction goes back at least to Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel (1953), written in response to John W. Campbell's comments that the two genres couldn't be combined. (Although Anthony Boucher's 1942 Rocket to the Morgue also touches on this[1]). There are now whole anthologies devoted to SF detective fiction. Niven himself has written several featuring Gil the ARM, including that staple of detective fiction, the "locked room" mystery.
Wikipedia defines a locked room mystery (LRM) as a story wherein a crime is apparently committed under impossible circumstances: no one could have entered or left the scene of the crime, and the death involved could not have been a suicide. But in an SF world, where it may be that the killer can beam in and out, or use a time machine, or walk through walls, the locked room is a trivial barrier.
"Neutron Star" is also a locked room mystery, and that's part of its genius.
Consider: we have a starship, with an indestructible hull, in the emptiness of space on a research trip to survey a neutron star. The two occupants, Sonya and Peter Laskin, end up horribly dead clearly through no act of suicide. Nobody entered or left the ship, and the General Products hull is impervious to everything. A classic locked door mystery.
The detective in this case is no cop or private eye, but pilot Beowulf Shaeffer. It seems that the Puppeteer-owned General Products Corporation is more concerned about what might be able to get through one of their impenetrable hulls than the fate of the Laskins, and hire/blackmail Shaeffer into duplicating the trip to find out. (Shaeffer isn't stupid, which is why he has to be blackmailed into this.)
This of course is akin to finding the killer in a LRM by setting up a new victim as bait and hoping the killer shows up again. Not the usual approach, but it works -- is essential -- for this story. The LRM provides the tension, the unanswered question, that keeps us reading. Without that -- well, a Niven would likely have still pulled off a salable story, but no Hugo winner.
That it's an LRM, though, makes certain requirements on the story that turn out to have long range consequences on Niven's fiction.
First, he needs an indestructible hull. Without that, nothing survives the neutron star encounter and there's a different mystery to solve (see Clarke's feghoot "Neutron Tide", for example).
Who makes this magic hull? The implications for human society are too complex if this hullmetal is something humans can make, but if it's alien then explanations aren't necessary. It's Arthurian (as in Clarke) magic[2]. So we need aliens. Apparently Niven already had the structure of the Puppeteers in mind, unused from another story. Their trait of cowardice justifies both why they'd invent an indestructible hull, and why they'd hire a human to figure out the problem with it.
So, the requirements of an Locked Room Mystery necessitates the invention of:
- - hullmetal
- - General Products Corp.
- - Puppeteers
- - cowardice as a distinguishing trait of Puppeteers.
- - Beowulf Shaeffer, a space pilot and a character smart enough to think his way out of problems he gets into.
- - and probably a few other things besides.
Did any of these have any impact on Niven's - and many other writers' - fiction? Nah... ;-)
(Oh, and if you want to know who or what killed the Laskins...read the story.)
Footnotes:
1. Boucher paraphrases Campbell's thoughts like this
"You see why we can't have detective stories in science fiction? It's the one impossible form for Don's hypothetical magazine of the twenty-fifth century. So many maneuverings are logically possible that you could never conceivably exclude the guilt of anyone. So you understand now how childishly simple your locked room is to a science fictioneer?"
"Don" refers to Don Stuart, a character in Boucher's book deliberately modeled on John W. Campbell (who wrote under the pen name Don A. Stuart). Quoted at " http://thethunderchild.com/Books/AnthonyBoucher/RockettotheMorgue.html"
2. From Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.", originally cited in his Profiles of the Future.
