Let me be very obvious at the start and say: a murder victim can’t tell you who the killer is. Locked-room mysteries are puzzling because the only person you’re sure was in the room is the one person you can’t ask for testimony. That’s also what makes locked-room plots such challenging things to read or write — a baffling impossibility turns out to be an illusion with a material explanation. An airgun from the empty house across the street, a serpent in the ventilator, a disguise or an accomplice or a clock hand nudged to display a fraudulent time.
Chandler famously objected to how this makes murder into something like a game — and he’s not wrong, ethically or aesthetically — but he does overlook the crucial fact that games are extremely fun. And my god do we need whatever fun we can scrape from these times.
No game exists in nature: they’re all things we humans make up. For the fun of it, and because humans are collectively allergic to boredom and will contrive to fill any empty time or space. Games are defined by their rules, even or especially when those rules are artificial. So you must only touch the ball with your hands is the rule that broadly defines the game of football (or American football), just as you must never touch the ball with your hands defines soccer (or football, for most of the world). The rules define the stakes: a hand on the ball in football is unremarkable; a hand on the ball in soccer is a shocking error.
To properly play the game called locked-room mystery, the corpse in the locked room must stay silent. The lock must stay locked. You must never touch the ball with your hands.
Science fiction is also a game.
It’s one of the better ones we’ve invented, I think. The great rebellious joy of sci-fi is that it rewrites the rules of our universe: faster than light travel, sentient mechanical beings, aliens and wormholes and alternative timelines and mirror universes and all. You must only touch the ball with your hands becomes you must never touch the ball with your hands. You transform a fact so you can explore the consequences — the propulsive and then what? that keeps the fictional pages turning. Humans colonize Mars — and then what? Robots can have feelings — and then what?
A corpse can tell you who killed them — and then what?
This was one of the initial seeds of Dorothy Gentleman. The other was a rather desperate and creatively fertile desire to escape the world as it was in the early pandemic. When we were all locked in our separate little rooms, hurtling toward who knew what kind of future. Filling time, as humans do, with art and hobbies and creation. People made so much bread. They played games where death wasn’t the end (Hades) and games about murder in space (Among Us). They waited until it became safe to see one another again (though it hasn’t yet, quite — ask the long covid folks how they’re doing these days).
With the fabric of the forgotten world fraying, it became urgent to imagine something in its place — a world where nobody went hungry, where housing was guaranteed, where disability and even death could happen but were not the desperate finalities that were filling us all with dread. I was plying my brain with small single-episode problems because I couldn’t solve the planet-sized ones. I was reading Wodehouse cruise ship novels and watching Poirot and everyone was suddenly singing sea shanties — and then someone wondered offhand why there weren’t more mysteries set on deep-space generation ships and my writer’s brain opened its ravenous maw and sank its teeth into all those things at once. And started chewing.
In an instant I knew what that ship looked like, and who would be onboard, and how they would feel about the murder they’d just discovered. An aunt and a nephew, fond but exasperated — and a detective with a passion for knitting because knitting is another great way of giving your mind little problems to solve. Queer people because I cannot imagine a world without them. And books, but ones you could literally put yourself into, to protect yourself from anything that might be threatening your fragile, disease-prone, all-too-stabbable human body.
Thus was the Fairweather born, and Dorothy too. It sounds inevitable in retrospect — but then again, I write fiction, and fiction is specifically designed to make the unlikely sound inevitable. I’m probably not to be trusted on this. It might just be that I was playing a solo game during a stressful time — the game called Writing A Book — and got carried away.
But not carried completely into utopia. The Fairweather couldn’t be entirely safe and cozy, because there were people in it — and anywhere you put people, you get greed, and revenge, and secrecy. If having enough money prevented people from being greedy, we wouldn’t have billionaires. Any time you invent a game, you’ll find someone who’s willing to cheat at it.
The big question for the story, of course, was this: if murder isn’t frightening and death is a blip, then what would we be scared of?
For me, the answer was simple: we’re afraid of losing who we are. Memory loss is a devastating reality for too many people, and its effects ripple through more families than you know. And there’s something particularly sinister about destroying a long-preserved mind, something over and above ordinary murder. The mind is also a very human game, after all. We’ve stitched it together from a tangle of systems — limbic and endocrine and whatever gooey bits let us think about thinking. If murder is burning down a house, erasing a mind is like burning down a library. A lot of people are too interested in doing that these days, too — that fear was very close to hand when I went looking for it.
The real secret — the thing I didn’t understand while I was writing it, but only discovered in retrospect — was that the Fairweather isn’t really about running away from the problems on Earth. It’s about the humbling truth that people are the best and maybe the only answer to the problems people cause. When cases get solved on the ship — and they do, it’s that kind of mystery series — it’s because Dorothy found someone willing to help her, someone else who cares about justice and caring and doing what’s right.
We might all be potential killers — but we might all be potential detectives as well, given the right conditions. Strength lives in the community, the big messy bickering mass of us, and no single villain is more powerful than the community. No matter how many of our bodies they kill, or how many of our memories are lost.
We cannot escape our worst tendencies, no matter how far from our home planet we might get. But the opposite is just as true: we carry within us the seeds of all our greatest games — justice, and love, and joy. All it requires is one person willing to tug on that loose thread, and a few other helpers along the way.
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