Science Fiction And Detective Fiction

Isaac Asimov and Poul Anderson wrote both sf and detective fiction. Asimov and Larry Niven synthesized them.

Sf characters must sometimes do detective work:

in Anderson's After Doomsday, the spacefaring survivors must identify the race that sterilized Earth;

Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn must understand several alien species;

in Anderson's "A Sun Invisible," David Falkayn deduces the location of a planetary system.

Falkayn had thought that the Kraoka, having colonized a planet called Antoran, were being helped by human beings from elsewhere. However, one human ally of the Kraoka, Jutta Horn, tells him that she comes from the planet Neuheim in the system of the star, Antoran. Falkayn deduces that, just as Solarians comprise Earthmen and Martians, so Antoranites comprise human beings from Neuheim and Kraoka from one or more other planets.

On the human colony planet, Nova Germania, a new republican constitution deprived the descendants of the original pioneers of their inherited powers and the Polesotechnic League favored the republic because it gave them a better deal. Robert Horn, a leader in the Landholders' Revolt, fleeing a League cruiser, found the Kraokan planets of Antoran and was given Neuheim in return for hyperdrive technology and training. The former Kraokan interstellar empire had collapsed because it was impossible to sustain it with slower-than-light (STL) ships.

By saying that there are three Kraokan planets, Falkayn gets Jutta to tell him that there are five. By saying that Neuheim must be a paradise, he gets her to tell him that it is hard for human beings who have had to move towards the poles as the planet approached its sun and adds that the Kraoka have also had this problem. Thinking that this information is insignificant, she tells him that auroras, visible everywhere, prevent clear sight of the stars. When she asks him about Hermes and he tells her about surf-bathing, she reveals that she does not know about tides. She acknowledges that Neuheim has no moon and that the sun, a tiny point, not a disc, is too far away for tidal effects.

The Neheimian and Vanessan constellations are very similar and the Kraoka would have been unable to travel far STL. Antoran must be large and bright but the League has already checked every possible nearby planet-bearing star. Ubiquitous auroras suggest an energetic primary and several planets have unusually eccentric orbits so where is this strange system?

The plot thickens.