And a follow up question

[james_davis_nicoll]

Are there any cozies set in generation starships? If not, why not?

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Are we talking about Cozy Catastrophes, or some other use of the word "cozy" that I'm unfamiliar with?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

cozy mysteries (http://www.cozy-mystery.com/Definition-of-a-Cozy-Mystery.html)

[sraun]

His prior post was asking for SF cozy mysteries - I assume this is the same.

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

A couple of CJ Cherryh's Foreigner books could be read that way, with Bren et al. as the outside investigators.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I can't think of any off hand... It would present an interesting challenge, depending on the size of the population and the degree of computer system oversight.

I'm now having to think about what would constitute shipboard security in a generation ship - would it be a village copper type set up where the bulk of things is petty theft, or drunk fights over sexual partners?

Probably the occasional crime of passion, solved in an instant.

I suppose the trouble is, technically solving a crime in a finite location with a fixed population who, more or less, will be able to account for their locations at any given time will be tricky.

You might have to set it near the end of the trip where things are starting to break down and the crew have devolved somewhat into tribal/family groups where feuds have arisen.

Cool concept though.

[rosefox]

I suppose the trouble is, technically solving a crime in a finite location with a fixed population who, more or less, will be able to account for their locations at any given time will be tricky.

I'm reminded of the SNL skit of a murder mystery in a hot air balloon, with Sir Ian McKellen as the detective.

[rosefox]

Worth noting, though, that many cozy mysteries take place in e.g. a snowbound country inn, which will presumably be a smaller and less mobile population than that of a generation ship.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

This is what I thought; the generation starship itself is too large for a proper cozy mystery. You'd need some way to keep the characters isolated from the rest of the starship. On the other hand, a smaller spaceship could be just right.

There will be any number of times when, as folks move around a single star system, that there's a dozen or so people off in a literally airtight can, with absolutely no way for anyone to arrive or leave and with their schedule both fixed and well known.

There are a few SF mysteries (Larry Niven, mentioned below, wrote about why writing a good SF mystery is hard), but cozies are a rarer subtype...

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Depends on the size of the generation ship, the crew and th pool of suspects. There's a good cozy subplot in The Other People by Ben Aaronovitch... It's a Doctor Who meets the culture rip off where a drone is killed in a Dyson sphere right under the nose of the sphere's mind....

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

This is what I thought; the generation starship itself is too large for a proper cozy mystery. You'd need some way to keep the characters isolated from the rest of the starship.

But see a comment below, about St. Mary Mead. What this flashes to me, is a shock/horror medium length story from mid-century. The bulk of the story is in an isolated part of the starship, cf St. Mary Mead. Communication from the larger ship community, ie Scotland Yard, is fragmentary. Everyone knows they are on a generation ship, and there are plenty of small clues that the larger community isn't Kansas, nor perhaps was ever meant to be. Perhaps SMM has always been culturally isolated, a pocket for a group cosyily familiar to the reader (perhaps SMM types themselves).

Then when the larger community law enforcement does break through the isolation, it turns out that its standards are not only not Kansas, but much much worse.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There were a whole lot of those domes on Earthship Ark in The Starlost.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

That would depend on the generation ship. Most of the country Inn type mysteries rely on strangers and suspicion. I am intrigued with the concept of everybody knowing everybody else...

I am minded that there were quite a few Cabot Cove bottle episodes of Murder She Wrote including one where the killer was the recurring character of the sherif played by the great John Astin.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

John Astin played the mayor. Tom Bosley played the (first) sherriff.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Ah. Damn you faulty memory and damn me for not checking Google first. I thought he was sherif when he did the murder? Never mind, seriously not important...

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Murder on the Orient Express takes place in, essentially, just the one train carriage.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Back when Turner Classic Movies was showing the Boston Blackie and the Lone Wolf series every Saturday morning it struck me there's a fine series to be made from setting those gimmicks on a generation starship. The ritualized nature of Inspector Farraday's suspicions and Blackie's working to get himself cleared could even become great societal legacies, a homegrown version of the Passion Play.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There have been some murder mysteries set on interplanetary spacecraft, and Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime was essentially a locked-room mystery where the locked room was the post-Singularity future.

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

And, in another direction, the variations on "who set the starship up to have all its inhabitants murdered by lack of recognition thaat they have in fact Arrived At The Destination and failure to take appropriate actions, and how can it be fixed by following a trail of thousand-year-old clues embedded in the walls and the culture?" should count.

--Dave

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

But given that, as you know james, any generation ship would have to adopt the most stable social system to survive (or would be forced to do so by the laws of sociological thermodynamics, which state that all civilisations eventually move towards emulating either a feudal, iron age or paleolithic social schemata), wouldn't any generation ship cozy be nothing more than a historical crime novel with the word "world" crossed out and substituted with the word "ship" in its place?

Also: Can anyone remember the name of that writer of paleolithic cozies who I'm sure totally exists so that I haven't just invented a new sub-sub-genre of the historical sub-genre of mystery novels?

[timill]

Best cite I can find is:
"I have always enjoyed historical fiction and have recently taken up reading detective fiction, so The Mammoth Book of Historical Detectives was hard to resist. The thirty stories included are arranged in chronological order, from a "locked room" mystery set in Australia in 35 000 BC and several stories set in classical Rome to a Sherlock Holmes imitation set in the 1920s, ..."

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

The mystery in the first tale being not who killed the victim, but rather who invented the room?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

So would the story in question be "Death in the Dawntime" by the late F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre?

Of which the author writes:

The Mammoth Book of Historical Detectives,
a British anthology published in 1995, contains a story I wrote titled 'Death in the Dawntime': this is a murder mystery set in 40,000 bc, among the prehistoric Wuradjeri people of southeastern Australia. That story has some science-fictional elements, but I tried to keep it accurate in its depiction of the Wuradjeri. I'm currently writing a novel about the song-myths and culture of the Nunggubooyoo people in the northern outback.

I am a bit disappointed to learn that there are no actual mammoths involved. Also to learn that F. didn't make a career out of prehistoric detective stories.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm disappointed to learn there's not a mammoth detective, then.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

You be spooky.

Larry Niven and I have one on the back burner.

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

Of course there are! Every starship should have cozys. Where else would the set their tea, earl grey.

[abigail-n.livejournal.com]

Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of the Day is set on a generation ship and is literally cozy, in that its main focus is the relationships within the community that makes up the ship's crew, the customs that govern their society, and the strain that life in space puts on both. As I recall the ship never even reaches its destination over the course of the book. But it's not properly a cozy since there's no criminal investigation, more like various eruptions of socially unacceptable behavior that the community's members and leadership have to figure out how to deal with.

[vass]

It does reach its destination. I liked it a lot: Quakers in Space!

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

I recall a novel by Simon Hawke involving adolescents investigating the unusual beings appearing on their generation starship. (It was a while ago; I can't figure out the title.)

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Here's a thought -- I wonder if severe isolation is explicitly not cozy. Cozies seem to be set in places that are, yes, out of the way of the hustle-bustle of modernity (urbanity?), but still, they are "right next door", and play with that tension (partly to show how "good old fashioned common sense is just so much more reliable than your modern scientific methods, DI Stiffly").

If you stuck a mystery on a generation ship, I have a suspicion you'd cut off that tension because those guys on the ship are impossibly far away from any hope of the wider fabric of civilization in a way that St Mary Mead just isn't.

Mind you, a fair number of cozies do deal with isolation to a certain degree (snow storms, car breakdowns, and so on), so maybe there's not much material there for a hankie.

[(Anonymous)]

Although cozies have a small case and set, they are set in a wider world. If the eccentric drawing room inhabitants had been born and raised in the manor, as had the staff, and had no interaction whatsoever with the outside world (except maybe listening to the BBC), and had to not only solve the mystery but arrest, try, and punish the miscreant themselves…

They what you'd have wouldn't be a cozy, really, but more of a "Lord of the Flies for grownups".

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Judge Dredd has actually had cozy story arcs, generally the mystery is solved in the penultimate issue and the final one is a chase scene after the guilty party tries to kill everyone in the "drawing room" including Dredd as Dredd is about to pass judgement.