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...
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....
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.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2012-11-25 04:27 pm
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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...
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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.
no subject