Batman Meets the Black Widowers

Yesterday I made the surprising discovery that Isaac Asimov contributed a short story to The Further Adventures of Batman— but not only that, this short story was one that reunited his famous Black Widowers! Entitled Northwestward, the subtitle reads “Black Widowers #61”. The story seems to have been an original one, and was only collected posthumously in the 2003 collection The Return of the Black Widowers.

It seems like explaining the Black Widowers is redundant to mystery fans, but there could be someone out there who is unfamiliar with the stories. (Indeed, I myself have only read a handful of them, despite meaning to read more.) The Black Widowers are a literary dining club that meets once a month. Each month, a different person plays the part of the host and brings along a guest to the meeting. Women are not allowed. When the brandy is served, the Black Widowers being the grilling of the guest of honour, who is asked to justify his existence. This is where the mysterious problem lies, and the Widowers fail to solve it. Henry, the waiter, is the one who comes up with the correct, and very simple, answer.

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).