Science Fiction Mysteries

Introduction

Science fiction and the mystery genre differ in the dates of their origins and sure of their approaches to fiction. Nevertheless, they are similar in being plot-oriented forms of fiction. Authors in both genres assemble casts of characters and focus on patterns of conflict within the constraints of altered, unusual, and odd backgrounds and contexts. Science fiction writers generally select sets of scientific, technological, or sociological assumptions and extend them coordinated into unknown and hypothetical futures, presents, or pasts. Within the frameworks, the writers create, mysteries abound, but within certain constraints.

Some science fiction writers base their assumptions on logical projections of known science, things that are possible given certain discoveries or conditions in the future, or that may have happened in some unrecorded or long-since-forgotten past, or that may exist even now, somewhere. They create probable or possible futures and alternative or imaginary histories. Other writers, through venturesome speculations, create what might be called future fantasies. These writers base their assumptions on logical projections of factors that cannot now be accepted by science but that are suspected to be possible or on yet-to-be-discovered scientific principles that may one day be accepted as at least probable, no matter how uncertain they appear now. These writers seek readers' acceptance of the premises on which their stories are based. Through careful detail, they construct scientifically plausible explanations or rationales for their altered settings and their consequences or side effects. The altered settings, having their histories and subsequent futures, may assume any number of forms at any time and any place or in dimensions defined by other parameters. They may involve powers and potentials far more significant than those of the human racetypifying the ultimate background for human actionthe cosmos.

Characters and Context in Science Fiction

Science fiction writers create characters shaped by their unique environments, which may have their physical constants or laws, and the social conventions of those environments shape their characters. Science fiction characters may be nonhuman or altered human beings. In such cases, their creators may, as with human characters of the remote past or far future, significantly alter or expand the range of perception, traits, and motivations of such characters. Alien characters may have unique physical structures, chemical organizations, and sensory mechanisms. Although such characters are likely to differ from human beings physically, they—like humans—have primary goals, dreams, objectives, motives, adventures, and torments that readers can share.

Science fiction writers must depict characters whose actions and attitudes stem from their natures and must impart some sympathy to them or to what they are to become. Writers generally avoid the kind of reflective character probing found in traditional fiction since it would be intrusive in a literary form whose power, mystery, and wonder arise from the characters' intersections, the problems to be solved, and the situations to be faced. Characters often follow some version of the scientific method that shapes their commitments to what they are doing or hope to do. Conflict can arise from personal problems that must be solved to some degree to work out the main issues. Still, the kind of conflict the characters experience involves aspects of the greatest of factors outside of and beyond the self: the transformative power of science and technology or the mysteries of space and time, matter and energy, life and death. Suspense and tension arise from watching characters struggle against frontiers extending to infinity.

Demands of Science Fiction

Like the mystery genre, science fiction places considerable demands on readers. It requires them to stretch their minds to think in new ways, apart from their accustomed conceptual categories, and to question assumptions regarded as self-evident or settled and involving anything from daily habits to worldviews. Science fiction writers commonly employ a third-person narrative point of view, moving back and forth from character to character or scene to scene.

In rendering the future, science fiction writers may impart to it the authority of history by using the past tense. Further, they may contrast present sequences of events centering on groups of characters with contemporary, past, or future sequences centering on other sets of characters. Their contrasts, built upon evidence within the fiction or assumed evidence outside the fiction, demonstrate the effects of human or nonhuman adjustment to conditions of life as they extend beyond the range of a single lifetime. Those contrasts can indicate wide temporal and spatial perspectives, significant differences in mental outlook or viewpoint, quality of life, and vast realms of wonder and mystery. They may, for example, involve events. Due to their tenacious nature and yet precarious position amid cosmic forces, processes, structures, circumstances, or settings that are possible for human beings are alien to human interest and even unknowable. In providing new or altered frames of reference built on suppositional science or technology, writers ask that readers employ a certain flexibility of mind; readers must accustom themselves to some degree of the strangeness of environments in which the rules of life, its constraints or limitations, have changed and so the results will change.

Some writers in the mystery genre, working within the age-old tradition of the mystery tale, focus on unusual doings, often involving settings and characters far removed from readers' experience and sometimes involving the supernatural.

Mystery Fiction

Writers in the mystery genre have traditionally interpreted its nature broadly. Whatever their particular subgenre, they tend to focus on unexplained things that are unknown, kept secret, or have indefinite possibilities. Mystery writers have created tales that date from ancient and medieval times to the present and draw attention to the oddities and complexities of central problems or circumstances. In this latter regard, their works are similar to those of science fiction.

Mystery fiction describes known historical and contemporary settings containing unexplained phenomena—alterations of the known or expected, though not to the same extent as science fiction. Mystery fiction settings and circumstances may be characterized by their peculiarity, inexplicability, strangeness, and distance. Mystery fiction can demonstrate or indicate actualities that are, or at least appear, more significant than a human being's five ordinary senses. Its writers focus on the extraordinary or unaccountable qualities of problems and occurrences that may never be understood. They provide, as in stories of hauntings, ghosts, ghouls, or the supernatural, or in stories of unaccountable events at sea, no more than enigmatical hints, glimpses, and suggestions that, at times, there may be something wrong with typical patterns of cause and effect, or with geography, or perhaps even with time itself. They select events or situations that can be and have been believed or experienced, things that, at one time or another, people have accepted as accurate without question or have thought that there was something to them. They may be enriched by folklore, legends, superstition, myth, religion, and the great wealth of tales handed down from generation to generation. The events or situations might be weirdly beautiful, eerily exotic, hideously strange, entirely otherworldly, deeply melancholy, suggestive of the finality of death, or murderously evil.

Writers of this kind of mystery, as with writers of detection or crime mystery, typically depict characters whose minds, emotions, imaginations, and sentiments can register or receive the impact and reflect the results of the settings, problems, or situations. Accordingly, writers bring to bear the unpredictability of human beings and the complexities of human behavior, things that might be bred by human imagining, by the combined forces of nature and society, or by the ways the past shapes the present and future, not to mention the influence of those age-old and unexplained questions of life and death. Doubts and fears, as a kind of anguish or torment, linger in the minds and memories of the characters and the readers, whether the events are to be explained by reference to natural but unperceived or still unknown causes or to greater-than-normal, unknowable, or supernatural causes.

Detection Mystery

Detection mystery fiction, as with earlier forms of mystery fiction, often focuses on particular places that serve as primary backgrounds or frameworks for the action. In these stories, detectives or small groups of inquirers use scientific methods to solve problems, often crimes. These problems may present more than one possible answer, each equally valid, none involving a supernatural explanation. Through a scientific detachment, the detectives reconstruct events, elaborate in structure, that have happened in the setting, moving back and forth from the fictional past to the fictional present. They employ methods of comparison, association, and difference involving a cast of characters who are depicted to provoke curiosity about the least or most likely suspect and about what will emerge through conversations involving the detectives and the suspects or involving the suspects themselves. This kind of discursive structure nurtures the impulse to connect and discover.

The detectives pursue many sets of relations or multiple lines of reasoning which, in retrospect, converge to reveal pertinent facts, a design inherent in events, causal connections, or succession of incidents. Often, simple, apparently harmless facts can undermine one's expectations or presence of mind, as when little or nothing is what it initially appeared to be. The improbable can be verified, and the fabulous can become factual. Questions tend to clarify themselves with each question, and sometimes, what is required is not more facts but a better command of the facts already known. Clever, skillful inquirers, protecting the innocent, eventually illuminate the mystery, having puzzled together a model or reconstructed events similar to a scientific theory with remarkable predictive success.

In detection stories, wrongdoers often remain unidentified and unsubdued until the end. The investigators eventually solve the crimes or prevent catastrophes at significant personal risk. They might, for example, dramatically trap or confront the guilty or tell of the punishment or death of the guilty when that information itself could be dangerous. Resolutions, however, although rationally satisfying, may remain partial. Human nature continually poses perplexities of motivation, intention, and behavior, as with those complications that grow out of the cultural patterns that shape human beings or with those baffling ways that the past, personal or social, remains in the mind and memory and thus shapes present perception and action. If there is no such thing as a perfect crime, that knowledge goes unheeded, never becoming a deterrent any more than it does in actual life. Still, many crimes remain mysteries, as do stories that offer no solutions.

Writers of detection fiction also produce a form of imaginary history, similar to science fiction. A writer may assume, for example, that if a given thing involved a particular group of characters in the circumstances presented, readers can believe that the characters the author describes would have said and done and thought things similar to what they did. In its narrative point of view, however, the story might vary from that of the inquirer to that of a recorder of events or both, or a teller of tall tales, or perhaps the one responsible for the crime which eventually sides with the forces of law and order, or even remains anonymous.

During the late 1890s, stories about science or technology began appearing in popular American and British magazines. These stories met the growing public demand for striking short fiction. They competed with and absorbed aspects of action and adventure stories, fantastic and occult tales, and mysteries. Weird Tales, a magazine founded in 1923, stressed supernatural mysteries, horror, and occult stories. It also published stories providing exciting glimpses of new scientific and technological wonders by such writers as Otis Adelbert Kline, Seabury Quinn, Austin Hall, H. P. Lovecraft, and Edmond Hamilton. All these writers combined elements of mystery with their science fiction. For example, Seabury Quinn contributed several stories involving the psychic detective Jules de Grandin.

In April 1926, Hugo Gernsbackan American born in Luxembourglaunched Amazing Stories, the earliest magazine exclusively devoted to fiction based on science and technology. He initially gave the vague body of writing that stretched scientific and technological premises the name "scientifiction." Three years later, after selling Amazing Stories, Gernsback launched another magazine devoted to fictional extrapolations of science—Science Wonder Stories (later renamed Wonder Stories). He then developed a new name for the emerging literary genrescience fiction. Gernsback stressed the potential for novelty or mystery in both Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories. He believes scientific development brings newness or unknowns to many forms of human activity and that science fiction should draw out the implications and imaginable consequences of these developments.

Gernsback's magazines drew upon earlier writers for specimens of this new form of fiction by reprinting stories written by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe. Each of these nineteenth-century writers had combined elements of the mystery genre with their well-known science fiction. Gernsback also published new stories by contemporary commercial fiction writers who combined aspects of the mystery genre with science fiction. These writers included Garrett P. Serviss, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edward E. Smith, A. Merritt, and H. P. Lovecraft. Gernsback recognized a public appetite for stories involving concepts that would become basic to science fiction, although they often derived from the mystery category. Gernsback also combined science fiction with the mystery genre in another magazine he launched in 1930: Scientific Detective Monthly (later renamed Amazing Detective Stories). This was one of the earliest magazines devoted to scientific detection.

Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, and Amazing Detective Stories at precisely the right time. At the end of the nineteenth century, some people thought that human knowledge of history and geography was reaching a point that would limit the plausible unknowns that could sustain imaginative speculation. As editors, writers, and readers increasingly realized, however, science and technology offered unlimited unknowns. These unknowns included indefinite or removed settings or situations beyond the confines of geography, history, and Earth itself, as well as new frames of reference that allowed for the study or observation of old things in novel ways. For example, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, new scientific developments revolutionized the understanding of physical nature, posing unimaginable forms of complexity, uncertainty, and mystery.

With his books, The Universe Around Us (1929) and The Mysterious Universe (1930), the distinguished British physicist Sir James Jeans made the new science accessible to general readers. He indicated, among other things, that given the dynamic features of physical nature, answers to its mysteries—its beginning, its ultimate composition, its possible combination, its size, its future—might never be known or might not be knowable to human intelligence. Physical nature appeared to have an open-endedness and strangeness that defied any attempts to describe how it functions as a system. Science fiction writers turned to such speculations of the time, especially H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Donald Wandrei; they developed a form of science fiction called comic mystery.

Other magazine editors, writers, and some scientists, like Gernsback himself, also recognized that science and technology were gradually but permanently and immeasurably altering fundamental human assumptions, aspirations, and attitudes. They produced new magazines, rivaling Gernsback's, that specialized in science fiction and bore titles similar to Amazing Stories, which proclaimed excitement. These magazines published fiction by established writers in other categories of fiction, especially mystery fiction, and new writers entering the emerging field. Astounding Stories of Super-Science, founded in 1930, later named Astounding Science Fiction, and, still later, Analog: Science Fiction and Fact, was the most important magazine to follow Amazing Stories. For more than thirty years, its editors, Harry Bates, F. Orlin Tremain, and especially John W. Campbell, Jr., kept the magazine at the forefront of the science fiction field, and it published many authors who combined science fiction with mystery.

In 2019, the podcast Moonrise celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the first human-crewed landing on the moon. Moonrise attributed science fiction and its writers during the 1930s and 1940s as instrumental forces in conceptualizing the technologies that would later become reality during the moon landings. Moonrise chronicled AstoundingMagazine as being particularly influential. Its writers and graphic artists inspired young people to seek out NASA later in life as engineers and scientists.

Often, a work of science fiction can appear in different media and formats. When these different versions are separated by a significant interval of time, multiple generations share different appreciations for the same work. An example is Frank Herbert's Dunefirst published in 1965. Considered one of the greatest science fiction novels, it was first made into a movie in 1984. Dune served as a theme for a video game in the 1990s, a television miniseries released in 2000, and two subsequent films released in 2021 and 2024.

Early Science Fiction Mysteries

It is not easy to date the moment science fiction and mystery joined. In 1909, Algernon Blackwood combined science fiction and detection in John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1909), a collection of stories involving an occult detective. However, the occult premise of those stories might justifiably exclude the stories from the label of science fiction. The merger of the two genres likely occurred during the mid-twentieth century, when Isaac Asimov, one of the best-known contributors to Astounding Science Fiction, began writing his famous robot stories.

In 1954, Asimov published The Caves of Steel, a novel many believe to be the most successful combination of science fiction and detection mystery ever written. Lije Baileythe human detective in that noveland his robotic partner R. Daneel combine their skills to solve a murder. Along the way, Bailey overcomes his prejudice against robots because of Daneel's selfless, noble competence. In 1957, Asimov followed The Caves of Steel with a sequel, The Naked Sun. Four years later, another writer, Poul Anderson, published After Doomsday (1961), an ambitious novel that extended the concept of criminal investigation mysteries to an entire planet: After the Earth is deliberately destroyed, two groups of survivors, one male and one female, travel in separate spaceships, searching for those responsible for destroying Earth and for each other. They then looked for a species similar to humans with whom they could live.

One of the most fruitful combinations of science fiction and the mystery genre involves methods of time travel, a field pioneered in H. G. Wells's brief novel The Time Machine (1895), whose unnamed scientist investigates the future of Earth. In many science fiction works, some means of traveling in time, or at least viewing the past or future. It allows characters to discover precisely what happened in the past or what will happen in the future. The characters then return to their time with secret or shocking knowledge that might transform society.

Among the many new science fiction magazines that appeared between the 1930s and the 1950s were Astonishing Stories, Marvel Stories, Startling Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Other Worlds, Future Science Fiction, and Galaxy Science Fiction, as well as The Magazine of Fantasy, which was later expanded and retitled as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. These magazines and others published stories by many writers who were influential in the field of science fiction, as well as writers in the mystery and horror genres. Collectively, they helped to increase the scope and appeal of science fiction.

Magazines remained the primary forum of science fiction publishing until the 1950s. Books with science fiction themes were generally labeled as science fiction in the late 1940s and early 1950s. After the mid-1950s, however, a significant expansion of paperback science fiction titles began drawing readers away from the specialist magazines, eliminating all but four or five. The handful of science fiction magazines that survived until the end of the century included Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, which began in 1977. Although the magazines have been popularized by books, films, and television programming, science fiction magazines have retained some of their influence. A similar transition in mystery magazines has left only a few influential magazines, such as Ellery Queen's Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

Unknown Circumstances

Implicit in much of science fiction are mysteries involving odd, unexplained, or unknown circumstances. A primary example of this mystery category is Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1765), usually regarded as the first Gothic novel. Such novels were characterized by settings remote in time or place, often castles fraught with gloom, ancestral curses, and omens—places where mysterious, thrilling, or frightening events could plausibly occur, particularly during storms and other terrifying manifestations of nature. The central conflicts pitted good versus evil and often involved magic, although science may usually resemble magic. Walpole's novel was followed by Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Matthew George Lewis's The Monk (1796), and John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819). Other important early gothic novels include William Beckford Vathek: An Arabian Tale (1786), which introduced mysteries of the Middle East into the framework of the gothic novel, and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1789).

Mary Shelley incorporated components of the gothic novel into Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), as did Edgar Allan Poe in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837) and his collection Tales Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Shelley and Poe, who wrote major mystery works, are considered essential forerunners of science fiction because they used scientific rationalization to account for startling departures from the norms of existence. They also warned of the consequences of misusing scientific knowledge in various ways. They contributed to an evolving body of work that eventually would be called gothic science fiction, an influence that reveals itself in the writings of many science fiction authors.

As late as the turn of the twentieth century, several sizable parts of Africa, Asia, South America, the polar regions, and the South Pacific remained unexplored and largely unknown to the Western world. Those places offered writers settings for imaginative tales about strange and wonderful things. One of the best-known writers to exploit such settings was H. Rider Haggard, the author of such famous novels as King Solomon Mines (1885), Allan Quatermain (1885), and She: A History of Adventure (1886-1887). Another was William Hope Hodgson, the author of The Boats of Glen Carrig (1907), House on the Borderland (1908), and The Night Land (1912). A third was Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle is best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories, but he also wrote The Lost World (1912), about discovering a primitive world deep in the unexplored mountains of South America.

Haggard's books described excursions into the interior of Africa and probed legends, religious secrets, and rites that had ties to ancient Egypt, the Middle East, and Asia. Hodgson explored the sea's mysteries, including islands of menacing landscapes and bizarre life forms, portals or gateways to other worlds and galaxies, and the horrors a remnant of humanity faces in Earth's far future. Doyle was interested in mysteries of an uncharted region of Earth where creatures of the Jurassic age coexisted with primitive human beings. Doyle's sequel to The Lost World, The Poison Belt (1913) illustrated how conditions in outer space can affect Earth's atmosphere and cause an ecological catastrophe. These authors and others created powerful themes and images echoed by many later writers; characters seemed to challenge the very nature of existence itself, and sometimes—most notably in Doyle's novels—they succeeded.

Allied Forms of Fiction

Science fiction and the mystery genre will always be related. When things cease to be mysterious, they cease to be of concern to individuals who will immerse themselves in those things with the intensity and resolve of authentic exploration. The inquiring minds and creative imaginations of characters in science fiction and the mystery genre have more in common than divide them. Writers employ a philosophy that recognizes that human beings will not likely reach a point where they can make no further discoveries; facts at hand may not be the only ones available, and facts will not cease to prove stranger than fiction in an infinite universe and require new interpretation. Both kinds of fiction provide at least glimpses of a frontier, in one form or another, where imagination and the unknown meet. They indicate the intricate, interlocking, mutually interdependent pathways by which physical nature and human natureor some other intelligent naturecoexist and evolve. They picture the never-ending quality of investigation and discovery.

 

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