You Want It Darker

In the opening pages of John Blackburn’s Bury Him Darkly, we are introduced to the legend of Sir Martin Railstone. He lived most of his life in relative obscurity in the 18^th century. However, late in his life, he entered an unexpected period of genius, both artistic and scientific. Rumours swirled that this was due to demonic possession, and many dark stories have circulated about him ever since. Sir Martin spent the last several years of his life furiously at work in almost total isolation. Upon his death, he decreed that all his work from this period be buried with him until the day that a (very specifically described) ancestor could lay claim to the inheritance.

Until then, the Church of England has been entrusted with the tomb and its contents. Yet due to the scandalous rumours about Sir Martin, the Church has refused to open the tomb. And now, time is running out. A new dam will leave Sir Martin’s tomb under hundreds of feet of water. Thus, a group of his devotees – including a historian, a former Nazi scientist, and a wealthy industrialist – take it upon themselves to open up the tomb before it is too late.

Apocalypse Now

It’s the beginning of the end. It’s official. The folks at NASA have done all the tests, taken every possibility into account. All the equations add up; the i’s are all dotted, the t’s are all crossed. It’s an inevitability. Come October 3^rd, a gigantic asteroid will collide with the Earth, causing a massive chain of apocalyptic events that will lead to the end of the world as we know it.

But Detective Henry Palace is not feeling fine. He has little reason to be. After the world’s end was announced, the world went a little funny in the head. People are leaving their jobs to go “bucket listing”, doing what they’ve always wanted to do. There’s also been an epidemic of suicides, as some people decide they don’t want to stick around for the end and decide on another way to die. People such as the insurance man, Peter Zell, found in the bathroom of a counterfeit McDonald’s, an apparent suicide. But something about this suicide seems a bit off, and Detective Palace is determined to get the full story. It’s not going to be an easy task, because for all intents and purposes, Henry Palace is The Last Policeman.

Oh, the Humanity!

Sometimes, you come across a book that is so good, you stop and wonder why you hadn’t read it before. When it comes to Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, the simple answer is that I had never heard of the book before. I’m not very knowledgeable about science fiction, and the only reason I picked this book up was on the strength of a recommendation from someone whose opinions I trust. Happily, the book was every bit as good as I expected.

More Than Human tells the story of a group of extraordinary people who come to find each other. They all have strange powers of one sort or another, and they come to “blesh” together, each person becoming one part of a new type of organism. In effect, they become the next stage of human evolution, homo gestalt. That’s all you’re getting from me about the plot, which is really tricky to describe without spoilers. But as with the neatest detective stories, all the plot threads you follow throughout the book end up woven into a tapestry of incredibly beauty.

There are monsters in Mirkwood!

Growing up is hard, but it’s even harder when you are a dwarf, living in a small town in Nebraska, where other kids physically torment you and everyone else shuns you, leaving you as an outcast. If you’re Dr. Robert “Mongo” Frederickson, you might even move to New York City and get a PhD in criminology, becoming a university professor after giving up a highly successful career in the circus. It’d take a lot to bring you back to your home town… such as the death of a favourite nephew.

Tommy was a bright kid. He had an incredibly high IQ and was a veritable wizard with a computer. He was also a very big fan of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and was part of a group of kids who played a game called “Sorscience”, where you score points by matching real-life phenomena to events from The Lord of the Rings. He and a fellow player were discovered dead, apparently a murder-suicide between two young gay lovers. The town is shocked and so nobody minds it when the whole incident is covered up as quickly as possible. But Mongo is then hired by an unusual person: Coop Lugmor, who abused Mongo when they were children, tries to hire the dwarf to investigate the deaths. According to Coop, his younger brother was no “fag” and he wants Mongo to prove it and catch the person who did this.

We, the Robots

In The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov created a fabulous and fairly-clued mystery, set three thousand years into the future. Civilisation has been forever changed due to space colonisation and the invention of the positronic brain. And as wonderful as the book was, I had a complaint with it: its false solutions were devilishly ingenious while the correct solution was quite obvious! But I eagerly returned to Round 2 with Asimov, as Elijah ‘Lije’ Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw return in The Naked Sun.

The Outer World planet of Solaria is an idyllic one, but one where humans are outnumbered by robots by about ten thousand to one. There is a grand total of twenty thousand Solarians, all living in isolation from one another. They maintain contact through “viewing”, a technology rather like Skype (without connection problems) where everything is in 3D. The practice of “seeing”—that is, being in actual physical contact with another person—is considered dirty and rather scandalous. On this world, a murder takes place, when a man is found dead on his spacious estate. His wife lies unconscious in the room and the only other entity present is a robot whose circuits have gone haywire.

Can you see?

The 2002 movie Minority Report is one of my favourite movies of all-time. Then again, maybe I’m a little bit biased. I’m a huge fan of director Steven Spielberg, I tend to like action movies, and I really liked the movie’s creative visuals and special effects. I’d argue that it’s one of the greatest movies made in recent years, and it’s also a movie that mystery fans would probably enjoy.

The movie is based on a short story by (who else?) Phillip K. Dick. It stars Tom Cruise, who in those days hadn’t yet become the major punch line he is now. Cruise plays John Anderton, Chief of the Pre-Crime Unit in Washington, D.C. The Pre-Crime unit uses “precogs”, mutated human beings who experience visions of future murders. These are interpreted by police officers who go and arrest the culprit before they can commit their crime.

The Case of the Slaughtered Spacer

I’ve really been on a roll lately with both my reading (hey, I’m on vacation!) and my book choices, with several brilliant reads of late like Le Diable de Dartmoor, The Murder Stone, Shackles, or The Devotion of Suspect X. This trend continued when I picked up Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel from my shelf.

The Caves of Steel takes place about three thousand years in the future. The course of civilisation has been forever altered by two technological advancements: space colonization and the creation of the positronic brain. In this futuristic world, which Asimov describes with detailed precision, a murder takes place, as an eminent scientist is killed while working on an advanced robot. Asimov creates an interesting impossible crime scenario, the details of which I’ll let the reader discover on their own (as I find that attempts to describe it suggest the solution too clearly).