It should come as no surprise that humans transported to space will be just as homicidal as their kin back on Earth. Nor is it surprising that interested parties—the authorities or private citizens—will seek redress for such affronts. Human is as human does. Don’t believe me? Consider these five works about MURDER IN SPACE1.
“The Singing Bell” by Isaac Asimov (1955)
(Collected in Asimov’s Mysteries) Inspector Davenport is convinced that Louis Peyton committed the first murder on the Moon. Psychoprobing could prove that. Peyton cannot be probed unless the evidence against him is overwhelming2. Davenport cannot even prove that Peyton was on the Moon when the murder was committed.
Enter Wendell Urth. Urth is as brilliant as he is sedentary. Is Urth brilliant enough to outwit Peyton, a career criminal who has eluded all previous attempts to bring him to justice? Or has Urth finally met his match in this, the very first Wendell Urth story?
I am always surprised to discover that Asimov penned only four Wendell Urth stories. Urth seems tailor-made for a lengthy series but that’s not what we got.
Flight of Exiles by Ben Bova (1972)
Scientists who were exiled from Earth (over fears that genetic engineering would destabilize an already imperiled planet) managed to transform their satellite prison into a generation ship and set off for Alpha Centauri. Half a century later, the jury-rigged starship arrives at its destination, only to discover that a planet can be life-bearing and still uninhabitable to baseline humans. The same genetic engineering that got the exiles exiled could transform their unborn babies to suit the new world… but would the children still be human?
At least the starfarers can take comfort in the fact that, unlike the inhabitants of degenerate Earth, each crewperson is the product of eugenic selection designed to staff the ship with the brightest, sanest, most clear-minded humans possible. They are all paragons in every possible way… except for that one crewmember who is currently murdering their way through the rest of the crew.
Bova’s Exiles series is a fine example of a series in which the characters are all convinced that they are terribly smart while making decisions that suggest just the opposite. For example, in the third book, it’s plot-relevant that the designers ran a cryogen pipe (whose contents would surely kill everyone exposed should the pipe burst) right through the bridge, and that the astrogators chose for some reason to aim their ship directly at the target system’s star.
Blood on the Moon by Barney Cohen (1984)
Asher Bockhorn spent twenty years as a Fleet Agent, chasing contract truants. Belatedly promoted to Detective Sergeant, Bockhorn is reassigned to the Moon3 just in time to be confronted with a dramatic case. Person or persons unknown have converted the staff and customers of Danny’s Castaways into a collection of gruesomely murdered corpses.
Was a single person the target and the other victims simply unlucky collateral damage? Or did someone have a grudge against everyone in the bar? And how does the bizarre sex cult figure into things? The evidence is voluminous, complex, and contradictory. As for Bockhorn? Bockhorn is easily distracted by unrelated minutiae.
There are police procedurals where every member of the team is a skilled professional bringing their unique expertise to the case in hand. This isn’t one of those procedurals. This is a procedural in which the characters flail for 260 pages, hoping to get lucky.
An Oath of Dogs by Wendy N. Wagner (2017)
Kate Standish wakes after a year spent in cold sleep to discover that she has been promoted. Standish was originally intended to work for communications manager Duncan Chambers. But Chambers vanished while Standish was making her way from Earth to the life-bearing moon Huginn. That leaves Standish as Canaan Lake’s new communications manager.
When not engaged in her professional responsibilities, Standish is drawn to the mystery of Chamber’s disappearance. Was it a simple accident? Or was Chambers murdered? If he was murdered, which of Canaan Lake’s many factions are to blame? And what’s up with Canaan Lake’s dogs?
Oath is one part murder investigation to one part alien worldbuilding. Both elements are nicely executed, so I am happy that Wagner’s upcoming horror/mystery novel, Girl in the Creek, looks as if it might touch on some of the same elements as An Oath of Dogs.
Seven of Infinities by Aliette de Bodard (2020)
Scholar Vân barely supports herself tutoring students. The revelation from shipmind The Wild Orchid in Sunless Woods that the poetry club to which both belong intends to cancel Vân’s membership is alarming. Her students might take the club’s example to heart and fire the already struggling Vân.
The unidentified corpse4 found in Vân’s student Uyên’s room is a distraction, but not a welcome one. The militia prioritizes resolving cases quickly over solving cases correctly. Vân has secrets, whose exposure she will not survive. Vân’s proximity to the death makes her a suspect. The obvious solution is to provide the authorities with an acceptable explanation. That will not be easy, even with the help of Sunless Wood.
The state of which Vân is a subject is authoritarian, hierarchical, and unacquainted with justice or mercy. It’s comprehensively unpleasant. Despite this, the characters still manage to find moments of contentment and happiness.
Of course there have been more than five SF works about murders in space. No doubt I missed your favorites. Please let us know about them by sharing the titles in the comments below.
- Alas, the obvious example, television show Murder in Space—can you guess what it was about?—was mentioned in a previous essay. I try not to repeat myself. Too often. ↩︎
- In a later story, Urth establishes that the psychoprobe is inherently dangerous to those subjected to it. Not only can the probe not be deployed arbitrarily, it can only be used once on any suspect. Some criminals deliberately orchestrate psychoprobing for minor crimes, to ensure they won’t be probed for more serious transgressions. ↩︎
- This is a moon of the future (2084) where Betamax is still a standard, as are VT100 computer terminals. ↩︎
- It is an interesting question whether the woman’s death was murder, execution, suicide, or death by misadventure. Does murder require a non-state-sanctioned element? However, there are other deaths in this story that are indisputably murders, so this is definitely a mystery with murders. ↩︎
The Patchwork Girl by Larry Niven. Decades after I read this, I learned that the gimmick of writing your killer’s name in your own blood as you die was first used in a Sherlock Holmes mystery, and I was today years old when I learned that L. Frank Baum wrote The Patchwork Girl of Oz.
I believe not the identity of the murderer but rather their motive.
I immediately thought of half a dozen, none of which got mentioned.
Besides Patchwork Girl, Gil the ARM investigates a number of other murders, although mostly on Earth. There’s also The Hole Man, IIRC Beowulf Schaeffer plays detective on that one.
I was also expecting you to use The Tea Master and the Detective if you dipped into the Xuya ‘verse.
More recently, there’s Mur Lafferty’s Station Eternity in which an unwilling detective fled Earth to an alien space station where she’s the only human. Then a shuttle full of tourists arrives and it’s murder time again.
Far From the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson has a shipload of new colonists arrive at a distant star in hibernation, only for the captain to discover that a number of them have been violently dismembered and others seem to be missing entirely. A disgraced investigator from the planet is offered a chance at redemption by finding out what happens.
“The Hole Man” is not a Beowulf Schaefer story, but there is one (“The Borderlands of Sol”) with the same gimmick.
A certain Michael Valentine Smith’s backstory starts with the crew of a Mars mission committing murder and suicide.
Micheal Valentine Smith or Valentine Michael Smith?
(“Stranger…”?)
Was there any mystery to that, though?
other than how he survived, probably not.
Only the mystery of why the psychometricians okayed that crew loadout.
The book is explicit that the “psycho-dynamicists” had compatibility criteria, and that until the captain-to-be married another crew-member-to-be, no acceptable combination of personnel could be found. It appears that their criteria weren’t stringent enough, or simply that circumstances went in unpredicted ways. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
I have read the book, you know. The five second courtship should have at least raised eyebrows, and so should the shrinks have seen the love triangle coming before the parties involved did.
What shrinks? IIRC, a computer trying combinations was how the set-of-crew was discovered; it’s not clear there was any human intervention after the initial conditions were set up.
See also Emissaries from the Dead by Adam-Troy Castro, the first in the Andrea Cort mystery series.
Ones that spring to mind include Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man (Nick and Nora Charles IN SPACE!!!) and Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes (crew investigate their own murders).
No mention of Star Cops? Nathan Spring and his motley crew did have a couple of homicides to solve – the second episode, “Conversations with the Dead” includes one definite murder, plus what might be a multiple murder, or might just be illegal experimentation (in about 25 years’ time, IIRC, we get to find out which it is, depending on whether the experimental suspended-animation technique worked.)
Hugh Walters’s “UNEXA” novels did include Murder on Mars… I don’t remember anything about it except, well, there was a murder, and it took place on Mars. The series was really running out of steam at this point, and it wasn’t exactly blessed with horsepower to start with. But it’s there.
IIRC, “Imperial Earth” by Clarke had a, not necessarily murder, but mysterious death as part of the plot.
Clarke’s “Breaking Strain” borders on a murder mystery, in that there is a death and the authorities have to determine if the dead man killed himself or had help.
Oh, and there was a Tales from the White Hart piece in which someone commits murder by proxy. All of the attendees at a sports match are given highly reflective programs, and induced to use the programs to reflect sunlight at a crooked ref. One program, the ref is dazzled. 20,000 programs all at the same time and he’s a cooked goose.
That would have been a great episode of Mythbusters.
Mythbusters actually did test something similar, along with Barack Obama, of all people. In reality it’s far too slow to even set fire to a ship, let alone burn a human.
I did security at an upscale office/shopping development that was in an intermediate phase of construction when I fist began. Some buildings were complete, with stores beginning to open, while other buildings were still in early concrete & girders stage with a wooden fence around the construction site.
One completed building was across the street from a fenced site. Upper stories had big tall east-facing windows on its upper stories. It turned out that 1) some of the upper widows were not directly aligned with each other, though not to an obvious degree, and 2) when the sun rose at just the right time of the year, and was at just the right height from the horizon, the reflections off the big windows overlapped onto the wooden fence across the street.
The fence didn’t quite catch fire, but the construction company’s plastic banner melted and the boards underneath were scorched and blackened.
(Problem solved by adding a pattern of frosted dots, like a Ben-Day pattern, onto the big windows. The dots helped break up the reflections enough to prevent a critical temperature being reached.)
Oh, yeah, the Mythbusters tried the “Archimedes Death Ray” more than once; I think the one with President Obama was their third attempt.
None of the White Hart stories were set in space, though, since they were scientific tall tales told by Harry Purvis to his fellow patrons in the namesake tavern, which was on then-present-day Earth.
I believe the motif of the authorities having to determine whether a murder had been committed was specific to the Paul Preuss expansion of “Breaking Strain.”
The other Clarke story you mention was called “A Slight Case of Sunstroke,” but it wasn’t part of the White Hart series.
There was also, I believe, a murder committed with what was technically a Death Ray in Tales From the White Hart.
Weirdly enough, although it is absolutely a White Hart story, the death ray one (“Let There Be Light”) appears in Clarke’s Tales of Ten Worlds collection, not Tales from the White Hart – or, at least, not the copy I’ve got.
The football stadium one – “A Slight Case of Sunstroke” – is also in Tales of Ten Worlds, and, despite the obvious similarity in themes, isn’t a White Hart story.
And yes, I went and got the books to check. I hope people appreciate all the effort I put into this petty pedantry. I had to go upstairs, dammit.
Thank you for checking. I have to rely upon decades-old memories in cases like these.
In White Hart, there is “Armaments Race” which has a death ray – but no murder.
Gosh I miss VT100 terminals
Your diligence is appreciated
And Malka Older has The Mimicking of Known Successes and sequels, murder mysteries on a gas giant colony.
And how can we forget Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries (series title being something of a giveaway)? All Systems Red starts us off with the murder of an entire spaceship crew and the series continues in a generally corporate noir tone; Fugitive Telemetry, however, is a very specific murder mystery with a single victim and a good use of the lone-wolf private operative hooks up with the cops trope.
I love how you used an Asimov murder mystery that wasn’t from the Elijah Bailey/Daneel Olivaw series.
I’ve done a couple of murder-mystery novelettes set in space, my Analog tale “Murder on the Cislunar Railroad” (reprinted in my collection Among the Wild Cybers) and my Patreon-published Troubleshooter story “Legacy Hero” (reprinted in my upcoming collection Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories, which would’ve been out by now if not for cover art delays). My other mystery story “No Dominion” would’ve been in space, except it was written for an anthology whose editor wanted Earth-based stories.
D. Duane’s Space Cops trilogy – space opera, but entertaining.
I presume you’ve already used The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn?
You know, I am not 100% sure I actually read Robots of Dawn.
It’s from the era when Asimov’s novels started being much longer than they needed to be.
He’d also discovered that women existed, and you rather wish he hadn’t.
Tricky. Do we count incidents on other planets as being in space? But in that case, isn’t Earth in space, too?
I note that two of James’s choices are set on Luna, and one is on an inhabited natural satellite named Huginn, which I understand to be named for one of Norse god Odin’s ravens – or satellites perhaps. So, moons are okay?
Places that require space travel to arrive at.
Travel from Earth, or from wherever you were before? ;-)
I think “in space” is usually understood to mean “anywhere not on Earth.”
Gideon the Ninth should be mentioned, despite how often it is mentioned.
And it’s not in space, but Gun With Occasional Music, by Jonathan Letham, is one of my favorite sci-fi gumshoe novels ever. I mean, hyper-intelligent enhanced babies that spend all their time in baby-bars getting sloshed to escape the side- effects of their brain enhancements. A hard-boiled noir detective who swapped genitals with his ex-wife and never got them back in the divorce? You can’t go wrong.
How Heroes Die by Larry Niven. Admittedly there’s nothing very mysterious about the murder (we know the murderer’s identity pretty much from the start) but the fact that culprit and the man pursuing him across Mar’s surface are running out of oxygen – and how this influences the decision they make – makes for a nice, tight story.
That’s ignoring the Gil ‘The Arm’ Hamilton stories, and didn’t he do a story or two featuring a female sleuth in the Holmesian mould?
This discussion reminded me of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Trouble WIth Time”, which features a Detective Inspector and was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. But on rereading I notice that no one is actually murdered, so it can’t be a murder mystery.
If I were inclined to be pedantic, I might argue that stories set on Mars, or the Moon, or the surface of any other planet or moon are not, technically, “in space”, and that if we include them we may as well allow stories set on the surface of the Earth. Which is, after all, also a planet travelling through space.
The reason other planets count and Earth doesn’t is that traveling through space is necessary to arrive at other planets. (Also, Luna and Mars specifically require the existence of artificial environments to sustain human life thereon)
Unless you’re from another planet, in which case Earth-based stories would count as being in space. Einstein taught us there are no absolute frames of reference.
So “The Caves of Steel” qualifies because an outer space man gets murdered on Earth! …if that’s what happened, it’s a while since I read it. It’s something like that, right?
All presently-known authors are from Earth
Or that’s what they want us to think…
Late to the game, but …
Star Trek‘s ‘Journey to Babel’ has the murder of a Tellarite ambassador to be solved, though it’s somewhat secondary to the main plot.
‘The Conscience of the King’ involves implicating the culprit of the mass murder of colonists on Tarsus IV, plus all the witnesses.
‘Wolf in the Fold’ spends an entire episode trying to figure out whether it’s Scotty killing women on Argelius II, or someone else.
Not going to include the numerous red-shirt deaths in the line of duty.
Writing under his real name of John G Hemry, Jack Campbell wrote a series of 4 novels in his “JAG in Space” series. At least one of them has multiple murders.
And one has multiple deaths – but not murder (or at least not by the main suspect)
James White’s Sector General:
“Resident Physician”: a would-be immortal alien is found strangely ill and unconscious in its spaceship. The alien’s log indicates that it was travelling with a personal doctor, but it thought the doctor would kill it. The doctor is not found in the spaceship.
“Investigation”: A new alien spaceship is found after it made an emergency landing. It’s surrounded by unconscious alien crew of the ship, who all have cleanly terminated missing limbs. Also, they are starving. Except for one, possibly. If you see what I mean.
Gur vzzbegny nyvra’f qbpgbe vf na vagryyvtrag ivehf gung vf vafvqr vgf cngvrag. Gur vzzbegny nyvra unf n fxva furqqvat pbaqvgvba, naq gur qbpgbe vf gelvat gb fgbc gur furqqvat.
Gur ha-zrzorerq nyvra perj anghenyyl sbez n pbzcbhaq ragvgl ol pbaarpgvat gurve yvzo-fghzcf gbtrgure.
Terry Pratchett mentioned the “leg rota” in Monstrous Regiment.
“The Ark” by Patrick M. Tomlinson – first book in a series, this particular one about a first murder commited on an arkship.
Also “The Forever Watch” by David B. Ramirez – a book thjats starts with a vicious murder on an arkship, and then changes course several times… I found it by accident searching for “The Ark” vaguely remembering it’s blurb. I liked TFW more :-)
Artemis by Andy Weir involves a murder (and sabotage and all sorts) on the Moon. I’m not sure that The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield counts as the murders are mostly committed on Earth, but it’s written by an actual astronaut which has to count for something.
Gallowglass. A bunch of people are recruited at short notice to man a spaceship that will be used to steer a giant mineral-rich asteroid to where it can be properly harvested. Only then one of them dies in mysterious circumstances….
I guess whether this takes place in ‘space’ or not is a moot point. The victim is killed while working on the surface of the asteroid, but the culprit is still on board the spaceship (at least, as far as I can recall). You decide!
Mentioned already but I really enjoyed Tade Thompson’s Far From the Light of Heaven, a locked room murder mystery in space!
Recommend you check out “Coup de Grace” by Jack Vance, one of his 10 “Magnus Ridolph” stories, in which Ridolph, an amateur sleuth, investigates a murder on a space station. (The other stories are equally marvelous, but none of them, as far as I remember, involve a murder in space.)
Death by Ecstasy, Niven. Wireheads take note, pleasure isn’t everything. One of five ‘Gil Hamilton’ stories he penned.
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty (2017) is a lovely murder mystery set in space. In fact, as the title suggests, there are six mysterious murders to be solved on the spaceship Durmire. Lafferty has given us a spaceship, interpersonal dramas amidst the cranky crew which includes six very human clones—some still in their vats, the better to survive the long trip into the stars.
Christopher Brookmyre’s Places in the Darkness
beat me by that much! Brookmyre is mostly known for tartan noir (although he and his wife have started jointly writing a series of medical mysteries set in 19th-century Edinburgh); I noted a couple of errors in this but thought it was massively better than what usually happens when a mimetic author tries to write genre.
My notes also say that the cover said “Chris”, not “Christopher”. Imitation Iain [M.] Banks, maybe?
My second favorite Philip K. Dick novel after VALIS, Ubik, is a survival mystery (–why aren’t all these people dead–) wrapped in a murder mystery (–when they were all in a room on the Moon when somebody floated to the ceiling and exploded–) wrapped in an existential crisis (–but actually the real victim that’s been killed is reality itself, whoops–).
And being PKD at the top of his game, of course none of that is what it seems.
It’s fun. I’m fairly sure the dead captain in John Carpenter’s Dark Star is a homage to Ubik’s plot point that in the future they’ll freeze dead people so you can pull them up and talk to them whenever you need to ask them about something. Yes, it’s the kind of book where characters talk to dead people, capriciously and maliciously explode, and objects keep turning into their predecessors. Also, there’s a great bit where the main character gets into an argument with the door to his apartment because he can’t afford to pay it to open for him (one of the finest examples of how PKD tried to warn us about enshittification, but nobody really heeded him).
I need to pull it off the shelf and give it a reread.
Definitely Mur Lafferty. Six Wakes, in which the clones of the crew of a colony ship wake to find memories missing and the bodies of their previous incarnations lying around, clearly murdered. Which of them killed them all, and can they stop it from happening again?
And then her Midsolar Murders (starting with Station Eternity), in which Mallory Viridian is a woman who murder always happens around (like Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher), so she flees to an alien space station where she is the only human (this curse only results in *human* murders). Then a new group of humans arrive, and the murders start, much to her dismay.
Richard K Morgan’s Altered Carbon ?
Jack Glass by Adam Roberts has several murder mysteries at its heart, as well as being one of the stranger books I’ve ever read.
One story is even about a serial killer and his robot (or serial killing robot and his person): “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester.