In 1959, I was ten. In the 1950s, the future was just around the corner. The cover blurb says that:
"Already well established as a science fiction writer, Poul Anderson turns to mystery writing with PERISH BY THE SWORD."
In the D & C Metallurgic Laboratories in Oakland, technicians use:
an optical pyrometer
experimental setups
an electronic furnace
X rays
spectography
raioactive isotopes
a polarimeter
The senior engineer wants a Beckman and is told that, if the Laboratories get enough business, then he can have a Beckman, a digital computer, a cyclotron and a spaceship. The company wants to spring its new discovery on the world so the narrative could become sf at any moment although Anderson will keep it within the bounds of the mystery genre.
There are sf detective stories by Asimov and Niven and a murder mystery is solved in Anderson's The Stars Are Also Fire.
5 comments:
Piper's Four-Day Planet is a detective story of sorts, although the majority of the characters, including the narrator, don't know through much of the story that there's any kind of investigation going on. It turns out, however, one character is a top-level government agent tracking down a particularly vile criminal — he'd enslaved tens of thousands of people, "most of whom were worked to death" in his mining project — and there's some discussion of how the agent verified the villain's identity, despite plastic surgery that included changing his fingerprints.
Kaor, DAVID and Paul!
David: I'm a bit puzzled, assuming a planet had a not too intolerably bad gov't, how could any criminal get away with enslaving and working to death tens of thousands of pepole? I would have thought such a regime would not allow the perpetrator to face any kind of punishment.
Paul: I like that "tinge" of science fiction in PERISH BY THE SWORD. And I only wish the hopes hinted at here of dramatic advances of soon moving into space had come to pass. Instead we had to endure the Great Stagnation starting in 1973!
Yet again, I'm grateful to Elon Musk and his fellow space entrepreneurs for so drastically shaking up things!
Sean
Sean,
If they do.
Paul.
Sean:
It wasn't fully detailed, but the people enslaved were nonhuman, so it may've been their native planet and thus not under official Terran rule. But the Federation reacted furiously when it found out what'd been going on under its collective nose. As the narrator put it:
"[List of crimes such as theft, arson, and murder, sarcastically referring to them as 'trivial']...if you make an off-planet getaway, you're reasonably safe. Of course there's such a thing as extradition, but who bothers? Distances are too great, and communication is too slow, and the Federation depends on every planet to do its own policing.
"But enslavement's something different. The Terran Federation is a government of and for—if occasionally not by—all sapient peoples of all races. The Federation Constitution guarantees equal rights to all. Making slaves of people, human or otherwise, is a direct blow at everything the Federation stands for. No wonder they kept hunting fifteen years for the man responsible for the Loki enslavements."
Kaor, Paul and DAVID!
Paul: My fingers are crossed as regards Elon Musk, et al.
David: Your comments does make the scenario you summarized more plausible.
Sean
Post a Comment