A detective on a generation starship is an interesting premise. Olivia Waite has taken the venerable concept of a slower-than-light spaceship, the Fairweather, taking humans to another star system and given it several new aspects. She has moved the launch date into a medium-distant future. The people on the ship are not desperate refugees fleeing any catastrophe recognizable to contemporary readers, nor are they intrepid explorers of the unknown. Humans of this future have mastered closed-circle ecology to the extent that they were capable of building a vessel designed for a voyage lasting more than a thousand years; indeed, as Murder by Memory they have been underway for more than 300 years. Biological sciences have advanced far enough that recording all of a person’s memories is a routine procedure. New human bodies can be produced in two days, rather than the customary nine months, and in this future it is done without requiring another human to do the producing. The ship’s computer is a genuine AI, though content to just run the ship and in fairness to Waite, she shows the computer mostly in the unusual circumstances produced by an interstellar magnetic storm. I think the story also implies that humans have mastered gravity sufficiently to generate it on the ship without a need for rotation or similar techniques.

Waite is not interested in the workings of a generation ship generally, or even in the specifics that she has set up; she is interested in arranging them so that she can tell the story of a detective clearing up a mystery. The ship has no police as such. As Waite describes the background, “From launch, the Fairweather’s Community Charter had been very clear that police were considered largely unnecessary. We had a small security force Ferry could deploy as needed—glorified bouncers, really—and a wealth of social workers in various fields; these two groups managed most everyday crises that arose.” (p. 19) So the society that built the Fairweather has not only solved gravity, it has apparently solved all of the human problems that give rise to sudden violence or to slower forms of cruelty. That’s not entirely accurate; Waite gestures toward the situations that call for the presence of ship’s detectives. “For more complex situations—your elaborate hoaxes, your sudden deaths, your inexplicable accidents and incidents in which witness statements vastly differed—there were the ship’s detectives. We had no power to arrest or enforce: our duty was strictly to sort out the truth from the lies and report them to the Crime Committee, which would arrange for any necessary punishments or reparations.” (p. 19) The very list implies a society bereft of abusers, sadists and assholes.

Continue reading