It's not over 'til it's over.

I'm currently about two-thirds of the way through The Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton, one of the books that I purchased with a gift certificate from this year's birthday gifts. Hamilton writes a modern version of what I think of as "space opera" - vast, sweeping, dramatic plot lines, epic settings, and a cast of thousands.*

The plot of The Great North Road starts on a more intimate level, with the discovery of a corpse in the river Tyne, which flows through the English city of Newcastle. The victim, a clone of the elite North family, has been killed in a distinctive manner: a five-bladed weapon of some sort (perhaps a knife-taloned hand) has punctured his chest and shredded his heart.

However, this is not the first time the authorities have encountered this particular modus operandi. A similar crime occurred twenty years earlier on the planet St. Libra, where another North clone was killed, along with his entourage. The sole survivor claimed that an alien monster was responsible, but due to the lack of evidence, the police decided that she was the actual murderer and incarcerated her.

The discovery of the corpse gives new credence to her testimony, but the authorities are still uncertain. In Newcastle, the police investigate the crime, while the elite Human Defense Army sends an expedition through the Newcastle gateway to St. Libra in hopes of discovering evidence of a hidden alien presence that may somehow have penetrated gateway security to wreak havoc on Earth.

However, the two streams of investigation seem to be contradictory. In Newcastle, the police discover that a cab was used by local gang members to dispose of the body, and trace it back to the scene of the crime, an apartment owned by an ex-girlfriend of yet another highly placed North clone. Meanwhile, on St. Libra, members of the HDA expedition are being picked off one by one under mysterious circumstances by some unseen menace that lurks in the jungle and leaves five-bladed wounds in its victims.

Logic says that both of these subplots cannot be correct - it's either a power struggle between North clones or an alien menace, a paradox which is puzzling the characters in the book as much as it's puzzling me. I'm looking forward to seeing how Hamilton resolves the situation.

Famed Golden Age science fiction writer/editor John W. Campbell once commented on the fact that it would be impossible to write a valid science fiction murder mystery, because there are too many ways that an author can cheat: time machines, teleportation, and so on.**   Hamilton has a bit of a tendency towards deus ex machina plot resolutions, and I'm hoping that he doesn't disappoint me by pulling some unlikely alien rabbit from his trans-dimensional hat during the final act.

- Sid

* In traditional space opera such as the Lensman series by E. E. Smith, the characters can actually be analyzed in terms of soprano, tenor, etc. Aliens would be the equivalent of dragons or some similar Wagneresque bit of scenery.

** In spite of which, there are several very good science fiction murder mysteries which seamless integrate exactly those sorts of SF memes and use them to create valid plot lines. Examples would be Larry Niven's ARM series, Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, or The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov, which was written as a direct response to Campbell's comment.