"Niven, Larry - Del Rey Crater" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

FLATLANDER
The Collected Tales of Gil "The Arm" Hamilton

by Larry Niven

Publication date: June 1995
Copyright © 1995 by Larry Niven

Use of this excerpt from Flatlander by Larry Niven may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing or additions whatsoever and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice: copyright ©1995 by Larry Niven.
Note: This sample contains Niven's updated afterword and the story "The Woman in Del Rey Crater."

AFTERWORD: SCIENCE/MYSTERY FICTION
I have always gotten too involved with my characters.
I certainly did while finishing "Death by Ecstasy."
Even now, I don't generally write of purely black-hearted villains. Loren the organlegger was my first. I finished the first draft of that story at six o'clock one morning ... went to bed ... stared at the ceiling ... gave up at about ten and went looking for company. I finished rewriting that scene a week or two later, at six in the morning. I gave up trying to sleep at around eight. Stopping Loren's heart with my imaginary hand was a rough experience. It may not shake you, but it shook me.
That was the first of the tales of Gil Hamilton of the Amalgamated Regional Militia, the police force of the United Nations. The second story bubbled in my head for a long time before I wrote down anything but notes.
Bouchercon is a gathering of mystery fans held annually in memory of Anthony Boucher, for many years the editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and of Fantasy and Science Fiction , and the author of the classic "Nine-Finger Jack." At the first Bouchercon, I already had in mind a most unusual crime with a most unusual motive. I outlined that crime to an audience during a panel discussion. "Death by Ecstasy" just sort of grew, but "The Defenseless Dead" was meticulously plotted in advance, and it didn't hit me nearly as hard. Maybe it should have. The story and the assumptions behind it are terrifying, and uncomfortably real.
Gil the Arm is one of my favorite characters. Riiight. Thirty years of writing, and still there are only these five stories! If I like him so freezing much, why not write more stories?
Because following two sets of rules is hard work, that's why.
A detective story is a puzzle. In principle the reader can know what crime was committed, by whom, and how and where and why, before the story hits him in the face with it. He must have enough data to make this obviously true, and there must be only one answer possible.
Science fiction is an exercise in imagination. The more interesting an idea, the less justification it needs. A science-fiction story will be judged on its internal consistency and the reach of the author's imagination. Strange backgrounds, odd societies following odd laws, and unfamiliar values and ways of thinking are the rule. Alfred Bester overdid it, but see his classic The Demolished Man .
Now, how can the reader anticipate the detective if all the rules are strange?
If science fiction recognizes no limits, then ... maybe the victim was death-wished from outside a locked room, or stabbed through a keyhole by a psychic killer who ESPed where he was standing. Walls may be transparent to a laser outside the visible band. Perhaps the alien killer's motive really is beyond comprehension. Can the reader really rule out time travel? Invisible killers? Some new device tinkered together by a homicidal genius?
More to the point, how can I give you a fair puzzle?
With great difficulty, that's how. There's nothing impossible about it. You can trust John Dickson Carr, and me, not to bring a secret passageway into a locked-room mystery. If there's an X-ray laser involved, I'll show it to you. If I haven't shown you an invisible man, there isn't one. If the ethics of Belt and lunie societies are important, I'll go into detail on the subject.
Detective and science fiction (and fantasy and police procedurals) do have a lot in common. Internal consistency. Readers. All these genres attract readers who like a challenge, a puzzle. Whether it's the odd disappearance of a weapon (a glass dagger hidden in a flower vase full of water) or the incomprehensibly violent behavior of a visiting alien (he needs a rest room, bad), the question is, What's going on? The reader is entitled to his chance to out- think the author.
Much detective fiction, and most science fiction, is also sociological fiction. See Asimov's The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun , and Brunner's Puzzle on Tantalus . Bester's The Demolished Man is that, and is also an involuted psychological study, a subject well suited to its society of telepaths. Psychological studies are common in crime fiction, too. So are puzzles in basic science, like Asimov's Wendell Urth stories. Garrett's Lord Darcy operates in the world of working magic, but the stories are puzzles in internal consistency. Ellery Queen would feel at home with them.
Mystery/sf needed defending once upon a time, back when Hal Clement took up John W. Campbell's challenge (Needle , with an intelligent parasite/symbiote as detective), but you're not really in doubt, are you? We could shape a sizable library from detective science fiction. Needle is half a century old, and there are older yet if we include Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." (His murderous ape was more fiction than animal research). Detectives seem to live beyond their stories: Asimov's Dr. Wendell Urth and Lije Bailey, Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy (fantasy/detective fiction!), and scores of pastiches (particularly stories by Poul Anderson and Gene Wolfe) in which Sherlock Holmes's niche is taken by aliens, mutants, downloads, artificial intelligences, or robots.
In the mixed marriage of mystery and science fiction there are pitfalls. A 1950s novel of matter duplicators, Double Jeopardy , suffered from internal inconsistency: a coin reversed except for the lettering, a crucial error in multiplication. Edward Hoch writes good tight puzzles, but his near-future mystery The Transvection Machine twisted human nature far beyond credibility, merely to make a tighter puzzle.
And me?
I was working on "ARM," which becomes the third story in this volume, before I ever sold a story. Frederick Pohl (Galaxy ) turned down that primitive version. So did John W. Campbell (Analog ). What came of that was two letters telling me why mystery/sf is so difficult to write, and what was wrong with "ARM" in particular.
"ARM" needed help. There were too many characters. There were holes in the science, the sociology, the logic. The puzzle grew far too complex.
So I put it away until I could learn more about my craft.
Most of my stories are puzzle stories. Naturally a lot of them become crime and detective stories.
"The Hole Man" involves murder committed with a weapon no normal jury could be expected to understand. "The Meddler" showed a Mike Hammer clone trying to operate with an alien sociologist at his elbow. "The Tale of the Genie and the Sisters" showed Scheherazade in a detective role. "All the Myriad Ways" was a crime story about quantum mechanics. "The Deadlier Weapon" and "$16,940.00" are straight crime stories.
These aside, I generally write more than one story within any imaginary world. It isn't laziness. Honest! It's just that, having designed a detailed, believable, even probable future, I often find that I have more to say about it than will fit in a story.
So it comes about that Gil the ARM lives and works in the 2120s of the "known space" line of history, whose story bulks at a million words as of this writing, including stories by other authors (within the Man-Kzin Wars volumes) and a half-written novel, The Ringworld Throne . Most of these novels and short stories take place in human space, thirty light-years across, but lines of development include the Ringworld (200 light-years galactic north) and the galactic core (33,000 light-years toward Sagitarius.) For crime stories set later in "known space," see the Beowulf Shaeffer stories in Crashlander .
Five sociological stories that are also crime stories took place along another timeline, the world of JumpShift, Inc., and "Flash Crowd." The assumption is that teleportation was perfected in the 1980s, and by the 1990s a network of instant-transportation booths has spread across the world. Alibis disappear, and a new kind of killer appears. He's the guy who would otherwise have moved away by now. Instead he finds himself living next door (effectively) to his boss and his business rival and his ex-spouse and the guy who has owed him thirty bucks for six years and denies it. Where can he go? So he kills.
Footfall , written with Jerry Pournelle, includes a murder puzzle among the alien invaders of Earth, though the Herdmaster's Advisor isn't even dead until a hundred thousand words into the book. By then you should know the fithp well enough to guess who, and how, and why.
Ten years after my first try, with several crime/sf stories in print, I was ready to have another look at "ARM."
"ARM" looked bad. I had to rewrite from scratch. I saved what I could: some nice descriptions, including the surreal murder scene, a couple of characters, and the strongest bones in the plot skeleton. I took out some verbal thrashing about in bizarre restaurants. Gil the ARM replaced Lucas Garner onstage. I took out an irrelevant nightmare, and a coin- operated surgeon device capable of implanting the bud of a new organ: wrong era, and it made things too easy for the killer. I took out the FyreStop device, which killed by suppressing chemical reactions: a fun thing, but unnecessary, and it complicated the bejeesus out of the plot. Losing that cost me three or four suspects, and good riddance.
(But look for excellent handling of the FyreStop idea in The D.A.G.G.E.R. Affair , an old Man from U.N.C.L.E. story by David McDaniel.)
When I showed the result to Jerry Pournelle, he made me rewrite it. He also showed me where the organleggers came in.
In general, then, I corrected the flaws John Campbell and Frederick Pohl had pointed out. I wish Campbell had lived to see "ARM."
How likely is Gil Hamilton's future?
I don't see how we can avoid the crowding or the rigid, dictatorial population control without the blessing of a major war or plague. As for the conquest of the solar system, one can hope. And as for the UN organ banks ...
One of my oldest stories, "The Jigsaw Man" laid out the basis of the organ bank problem. If Jeffrey Dahmer had been executed in a hospital, disassembled like a jigsaw puzzle, he could have saved as many lives as he took. So can any adult who has committed a capital crime. Or any child whose crime is deemed to be adultlike ... and hey, kids are committing a lot of murders these days, and wouldn't you rather have a fifteen-year-old's organs than an elderly Charles Manson's? If that approach still leaves the Red Cross needing whole blood and patients crying for eyes and kidneys, then Rush Limbaugh and John Bobbitt are constantly violating principles of political correctness. And what about the guy who thinks he can ruin a wetlands just because he paid for the land?
Where do we stop?
Ever since publication of "The Jigsaw Man," letters have been flowing in. They come with clippings and photocopies of newspapers stories. An army of readers (the Reluctant Donor Irregulars?) seems ready to alert me to developments regarding transplants and organ banks.