Just Finished Reading: Future Crimes – Mysteries and Detection Through Time and Space edited by Mike Ashley (FP: 2021) [299pp]
This was my second foray into the British Library Science Fiction Classics and my second book of short stories from them. Not to sound like a broken record – if that metaphor means anything anymore – short story collections tend to be rather hit and miss. The advantage being, of course, that if you hit on a poor one then a better one should be along shortly. This collection was indeed rather variable. Older SF sometimes doesn’t age very well at all, and it quickly becomes abundantly clear that many of the stories from the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s were just standard stories plus the addition of a spaceship, time machine or laser gun. Taking these elements away really wouldn’t have changed the narrative overly much – so not really Science-Fiction then! One of the most interesting things I’ve always enjoyed about SF is seeing how people (or whole societies) react to a scientific change or discovery. How will the world react to finally KNOWING we’re not alone in the Universe, for example, or how will the world's economy (and much else besides) adapt to instant teleportation? That’s what I really find fascinating about the genre – playing with ideas, big and small.
Most of the stories in this collection – 10 in all from 1912 to 1972 – fall into the category of SF elements tacked onto (with various levels of success!) to standard crime stories. Generally, whilst readable, they don’t ‘work’ brilliantly. But a few do stand out. I was quite impressed by ‘Legwork’ by Eric Frank Russell (1956) where a seemingly invincible shapeshifting telepathic alien invader is tracked down using good old-fashioned police work, ‘Elsewhen’ by Anthony Boucher (1943) where a short-range time-machine is used to create the perfect alibi only for the murderer to realise that time-travel is far more complicated than he first thought, ‘Murder, 1986’ by P D James (1970) where a plodding Detective Seargent investigates the murder of an alien pandemic victim despite official indifference with surprising results, and finally ‘The Absolutely Perfect Murder’ by Miriam Allen deFord (1965) were the opportunity to erase a nagging wife from existence proves challenging due to a lie.
Not the best way into the often fun and interesting genre cross-over of SF and Crime but a pretty decent introduction to some of the themes involved. More to come from the series and from other genre clashes. Reasonable.
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2 comments:
I think it was Russell who did that fun story called The Great Explosion, where a ship from Earth goes forth visiting independent colonies of humans and tries to re-impose rule from Earth on them, and each planet has a different little system. The only one I remember were the Gandhi-libertarians.
Doesn't ring any bells, but it was always the kind of story I liked best - world-building with political & economic structures to explore & debate... Heaven!
I was always less interested in whether the aliens had fangs (or spaceships!) and more interested if they were a Monarchy or an Anarcho-Syndicalist commune.
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