9/8/15

The Man on the Moon


"I think we're going to the moon, because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges."
-
Neil Armstrong (Commander of the Apollo 11 Mission)
I'm not sure if James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977) would've captured my attention, if it weren't for a very tantalizing review on Ho-Ling's blog.

Inherit the Stars is categorized by some as a science-fiction mystery and procured a high-ranking spot on Japan's Tozai Mystery Best 100, which left behind many classics and fan-favorites – such as Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (1937) and William L. DeAndrea's The HOG Murders (1979). That's something that'll get you noticed around this neck of the woods!

The events described in the book take place between the years 2027 and 2029, which is only a mere 12 years away from us, but, evidently, it's set in a world where history took a different path.

It's an alternative universe that saw "the ideological and racial tensions inherited from the twentieth century" being swept away as a result of a "tide of universal affluence and falling birth rates that came with the spread of high-technology living." A surplus of funds and resources, that became available after worldwide demilitarization, where shoveled in a rapidly expending United Nations Solar System Exploration – which has a floating laboratory above Venus, exploring Martian surface and has settled the Moon.

Than they make a discovery that could "keep the entire scientific world arguing for decades."

A normal-sized, anatomically modern remains of a human in a spacesuit is uncovered on the Moon, who’s christened "Charlie," but carbon-dating poses a serious problem to the scientific community and recorded history: the semi-mummified corpse and equipment is over 50.000 years old! It's a problem of the impossible kind, because humans were primitive hunters-gatherers at that period in time and than there's the lack of archaeological evidence of an ancient, technological advanced civilization in Earth's prehistory.

Japanese cover of Inherit the Stars
There are droves of scientists examining Charlie and his equipment, which range from physicists and linguistic experts to mathematicians and evolutionary biologists, but the main character the readers follows around is Dr. Victor Hunt – who's the one who eventually pieces everything together and comes up with a beautiful, unifying hypothesis to explain all that they've discovered.

It's next to impossible to give a brief, teasing summary of the investigation between Charlie's discovery and Hunt's explanation, because of the enormous scale of events and potential spoilers involved.

The extensive reconstruction of the distant past, analyzing of evidence and tossing around theories is very reminiscent of the detective genre, but key elements of Inherit the Stars are firmly rooted in science-fiction and this makes the book very different in nature from other science-fiction mysteries that attempt to find a balance between the two – such as Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942) and Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954).

On the other hand, you should be able, based on the given evidence, to arrive at a similar conclusion as Hunt and that's quite an accomplishment if you know what the explanation is – which is, as Ho-Ling noted in his review, something that goes beyond a simple murder case with an alibi-trick or a locked room.

I actually feel embarrassed about my second-rate solution that had the carbon dating pegged as a red herring that covered the fact that Charlie was actually from a far-flung future instead of the distant past. Luckily, I was as wrong about that as my first impression that the solution might've been a cross between the Piltdown hoax and legends of missing Soviet cosmonauts.

So, before this becomes another shabbily written, outdrawn review that uses a lot of words to say very little... I'll conclude by saying that, read as a mystery, you'll find something far, far off the beaten track – which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The only sad part about Inheriting the Stars is that we, in 2027, won't have any people "exploring the Martian deserts" or plummeting "down, down, deep into the ice crust of Ganymede" inside a protected capsule to witness something truly special.

Finally, I tagged this review as a "locked room mystery" and "impossible crime" for one simple reason: we're culturally appropriating this novel. It's ours now!

12 comments:

  1. Sounds like just the sort of thing I'd enjoy!

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    1. It's definitely worth a shot for seasoned mystery readers who've read tons of mysteries of every possible shape and stripe, because it's something very, very different that still can be considered a detective story. I hope you'll enjoy as much as I have!

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  2. Inherit the Stars is the first volume of a five-volume series. See the Internet Speculative Fiction Database for more details. There will not be any more books in the series because Hogan died in 2010. But why do you think we won't be exploring Mars? I am hoping that Chinese interest in space will spark a new space race.

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    1. From what I've read, the best volumes in the series are the ones that were originally intended as a trilogy. So I might take a look at the next two books at some point, because I'm kind of curious now.

      I hope we'll be exploring the Martian surface before long, but I doubt we’ll be doing it within the time-frame of Inherit the Stars. There's just no way we'll have everything (or are fully capable of doing everything) mentioned in the story by 2027.

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  3. The book was definitely a very pleasant surprise to me as someone who seldom reads outside the genre. I especially loved the segments that included fields seldom seen in detective fiction (linguistics!).

    There's also a manga version of the book, by the way and it's been a very popular science-fiction novel in Japan ever since it was first published there.

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    1. I tried to think of a mystery with a linguistics angle, but I couldn't think of one. This requires further investigation!

      I can understand why the book is popular in Japan and how it ended up on a list of best mystery novels. The book doesn't feature any actual cut-up corpses to create a clever piece of misdirection, but there's a part of the explanation that could be considered as exactly such a trick played out on a planetary scale.

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    2. Well, mysteries that make use of linguistics are not very common, but there are some famous examples. The first part of Matsumoto's Inspector Imanishi Investigates comes in mind for example. Detective Conan 74 has what is in my opinion the best linguistics story yet (also because it's one of the funniest stories ever, but I'm afraid it's one that is hard to understand in translation...)

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    3. Two examples I haven't read (yet), but I'm sure there must be more of them. Wasn't there Detective Conan story in which a misunderstanding between English-and Japanese speaking characters played a vital role? I think it was the one with the Spider Mansion?

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    4. That's one too, but I think that the volume 74 story is the only (full-sized) mystery story I've ever read where linguistics is the core of the puzzle plot (and not just an extra).

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  4. Sounds really great TC - right, off to order this right now! Love genre hybrids when they're done right :)

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    1. Than you'll probably love this one, Sergio! I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I have.

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  5. I am glad to see some other readers who appreciate this book. I remember reading the book when it first came out, and still have the paperback. It is the book that turned me into a fan of Hogan's work. He wrote many excellent science fiction books.

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