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dr_dshiv

> Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel.

Isaac Asimov figured that out!

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What do you mean? All I read was foundation, some non fiction, and robot short story collections.

Are you being sarcastic? The Robot novels are basically crime novels with robots...

Aye, the main character is a detective.

Also the Black Widower stories. I'm sure others as well.

It's not sarcasm: the conventional wisdom was that an SF novel could not also be a satisfying mystery/detective novel, because the readers could not guess that Aldebaranians can see in ultraviolet, or any other authorial invention.

Asimov's insight was that it was up to the author to play rigorously fairly: every fact of consequence needed to be revealed naturally.

And that's what I love about the robot stories. He sets up the law of robotics, just like Agatha Christie and friends set up the detective fiction commandments, and then Asimov sets about finding all the loop holes in the laws of robotics. Every story is one loop-hole.

There's actually a significant corpus of robot stories. However, I did forget that "I, Robot" does have a lot of crimes, investigations, and such.

I am talking about these for example

The Caves of Steel (1954) - first Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel

The Naked Sun (1957) - second Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel

"Mirror Image" (1972) - short story about R. Daneel Olivaw and detective Elijah Baley

The Robots of Dawn (1983) - third Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel Robots and Empire (1985) - fourth Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel

Yeah I didn't really think of those as detective stories but it has been a few decades.

I did read one out-and-out crime novel by Asimov. You will not be surprised to learn that the victim was graduate student in chemistry, the murder occurred in a laboratory, and the plot twist turned on something known chiefly to chemists.

(I've forgotten the title--I read the book nearer 50 than 40 years ago.)

I did read one out-and-out crime novel by Azimov. You will not be surprised to learn that the victim was graduate student in chemistry, the murder occurred in a laboratory, and the plot twist turned on something known chiefly to chemists.

(I've forgotten the title--I read the book nearer 50 than 40 years ago.)

Edit: I see from Wikipedia that it was The Death Dealers, later republished as A Whiff of Death.

He used the detective/crime dialogue format to deliver sci-fi.

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