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It's a crime

There are some interesting structural differences between writing a police procedural novel (that sub-genre of crime that deals with how the police pursue the process of detection) and writing a science fiction thriller. I'm currently elbow-deep in the guts of a pantomine horse of a novel (SF thriller at one end, police procedural at the other) so this is a topic of some interest to me right now.

One of the features of genre crime fiction is closure: the natural order of things is out of kilter (a crime has been committed) and at the end of the story the natural balance is restored (the criminal has been apprehended). There are, of course, variations: an ancient miscarriage of justice must be righted, or the detective is a serial killer or a purple singing dinosaur ... but the essential form is about the restoration of justice, whereas SF has a tendency towards divergence: nothing will ever be the same again.

How do you reconcile the divergent goals of the two media?

One option is to do metafiction: use SF as a lens for examining the process of crime and detection, turning a cold camera eye away from the traditional certainties of method, motive, and opportunity to dwell instead on how criminal behaviour is defined. Aside from the ancient bedrock offenses (killing, assault — sexual or otherwise — and theft) there's a vast spectrum of grey, within which any number of shades clash for our recognition of their severity or innocence. (File sharing: threat or promise? The very wording of legislation governing it would strike a lawmaker of the 18th century as gibberish, in the absence of a crash course in modern technology.)

Another option is to examine the likely policing of things as they might come to pass: is it murder to pull the plug on a computer hosting an artificial general intelligence or a running uploaded copy of a human mind? If a spammer sends a billion emails, each of which cost the recipient on average one second of their life, is it proportionate to deprive them of their liberty for a corresponding time? Hint: that's thirty years.

(And then, there's my approach: flail around happily in a near-future paddling pool full of brightly coloured machine parts ideas, until enough of them jammed together in the right pattern say something interesting.)

An interviewer once asked the elderly Agatha Christie how she got her her puzzle-box murder mysteries to hang together so elegantly. To paraphrase her: "first I write nine-tenths of the book. I put in lots of clues, and many suspects, and hapless detectives. But I don't know who did the deed! When I reach the nine-tenths point, I go back through the manuscript and make notes, until I know who the murderer is. I then go back again and take out all the contradictory clues — except for obvious red herrings — and write the climax, in which the killer is unmasked."

If you substitute "what the crime is" for "who the murderer is", this strikes me as being an approach eminently applicable to police-procedural SF ...

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