UPDATE: Richard Wilson's "Murder from Mars"

Added the SFFAudio link and brightened up the image (HERE).

"Their Pleasure, in Short, Is Puzzles"

IN CASE you haven't noticed, Election Fever is gripping the nation; so, in honor of the occasion, we present a story involving Ellery Queen (the detective) not solving a problem 

but propounding one:

"The President Regrets."

By Ellery Queen (Wikipedia HERE and the GAD Wiki HERE).

The Puzzle Club No. 2.

First appearance: The Diners Club Magazine, September 1965.

Reprinted in EQMM, July 1967 (today's text).

Other reprints:

 Tales of Mystery and Suspense (1977)

 Ellery Queen’s Anthology #36, Fall/Winter 1978.

Short short story (5 pages).

Online at The Luminist Archives (HERE; go to text page 94).

(Some text magnification may be necessary.)

   "In that case, Ellery said, with resignation, which of Valetta's four swains murdered her?"

WHAT'S in a name—or should we say names? The solution to a murder puzzle, of course.

Main characters:

~ The Puzzle Club: Syres, Darnell, Dr. Vreeland, Dr. Arkavy (absent again), Emmy Wandermere, and Ellery Queen. Others: Valetta van Buren, John Thrushbotton 

Taylor the Third, A. Palmer Harrison, Leonardo Price, and Biff Wilson.

References and resources:

- "since their youthful days as riggers in the Texas oilfields":

  The Texas reference and the date of the story suggest "the President" here to be LBJ:

  "Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973), often referred to as LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, under whom he had served as the 37th vice president from 1961 to 1963. A Democrat from Texas, Johnson also served as a U.S. representative and U.S. senator." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- We covered the first Puzzle Club story (HERE).

The bottom line:

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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"More Than Simple Murder"

"You See but You Do Not Observe."

By Robert J. Sawyer (born 1960; Wikipedia HERE and the ISFDb HERE).

First appearance: Sherlock Holmes in Orbit (1995).

Reprints page (ISFDb HERE).

Short story (10 pages as a PDF).

Online at the Baen Free Library (HERE).

   "I am a scientist—and I have used certain scientific principles to pluck you from your past and bring you into my present."

THE big question is, "Where are they?" But an even bigger question is, "What's Sherlock Holmes going to do about it?"

Principal characters:

~ Watson ("There was no sensation associated with the chronotransference, except for a popping of my ears which I was later told had to do with a change in air pressure"), Mycroft Holmes ("My parents weren't that cruel"), Sherlock Holmes ("In a very real sense, my good, dear friend, you killed me"), and Moriarty ("It was all I could do to keep from drawing my pistol and putting an end to the blackguard").

References and resources:

- The story title:

  From "A Scandal in Bohemia" (HERE).

- "the Fermi paradox":

  "The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, 'If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now'." (Wikipedia HERE.)

(Click on image to enlarge.)

- "the Drake equation":

  "The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy." (Wikipedia HERE.)

(Click on image to enlarge.)

- "Dyson spheres":

  "A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its solar power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to imagine how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet's resources alone. Because only a tiny fraction of a star's energy emissions reaches the surface of any orbiting planet, building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "Like in the stories of Verne and Wells?":

  "His [Verne's] novels, always well-researched according to the scientific knowledge then available, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time." (Wikipedia HERE.)

  "As a futurist, he [Wells] wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility and biological engineering before these subjects were common in the genre." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "The capacity for the human brain to store and retrieve information is almost infinite":

  Size isn't everything:

  "Other animals, including whales and elephants, have larger brains than humans. However, when the brain-to-body mass ratio is taken into account, the human brain is almost twice as large as that of a bottlenose dolphin, and three times as large as that of a chimpanzee. However, a high ratio does not of itself demonstrate intelligence: very small animals have high ratios and the treeshrew has the largest quotient of any mammal." (Wikipedia HERE.)

  "The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash drive. Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage." (Scientific American.com HERE.)

- "the neural nets":

  "A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either biological cells or mathematical models. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a network can perform complex tasks." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "that terrible case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra":

  Mentioned by Watson in "The Sussex Vampire" (HERE); the story is (HERE).

- "an Austrian physicist named Erwin Schrödinger":

  "Schrödinger was not entirely comfortable with the implications of quantum theory referring to his theory as 'wave mechanics.' He wrote about the probability interpretation of quantum mechanics, saying, 'I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.' (Just in order to ridicule the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, he contrived the famous thought experiment called Schrödinger's cat paradox . . .)" (Wikipedia HERE.) Also see Wikipedia (HERE).

- "Alphonse Karr" and "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose":

  "Karr is remembered for many of his statements, including the well-known aphorism plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose usually translated as 'the more things change, the more they stay the same.'

  "On the proposal to abolish capital punishment, he wrote: 'je veux bien que messieurs les assassins commencent' (i.e., 'let the gentlemen who do the murders take the first step')." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "holography":

  "Holography has been widely referred to in movies, novels, and TV, usually in science fiction, starting in the late 1970s. Science fiction writers absorbed the urban legends surrounding holography that had been spread by overly-enthusiastic scientists and entrepreneurs trying to market the idea. This had the effect of giving the public overly high expectations of the capability of holography, due to the unrealistic depictions of it in most fiction, where they are fully three-dimensional computer projections that are sometimes tactile through the use of force fields." (Wikipedia HERE.) Also see Wikipedia (HERE).

- "the Very Large Array of radio telescopes":

  "The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) is a centimeter-wavelength radio astronomy observatory in the southwestern United States. It lies in central New Mexico on the Plains of San Agustin, between the towns of Magdalena and Datil, approximately 50 miles (80 km) west of Socorro. The VLA comprises twenty-eight 25-meter radio telescopes (twenty-seven of which are operational while one is always rotating through maintenance) deployed in a Y-shaped array and all the equipment, instrumentation, and computing power to function as an interferometer. Each of the massive telescopes is mounted on double parallel railroad tracks, so the radius and density of the array can be transformed to adjust the balance between its angular resolution and its surface brightness sensitivity." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "That you and Moriarty had plunged to your deaths, locked in mortal combat":

  Events chronicled by Watson in "The Final Problem" (HERE).

- "that case of the infamous Colonel Sebastian Moran and his victim, the Honorable Ronald Adair":

  Referring to Holmes's "resurrection" in "The Adventure of the Empty House" (HERE).

- "that gifted Italian, Guglielmo Marconi":

  "Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi (1874–1937) was an Italian inventor, electrical engineer, physicist, and politician, known for his creation of a practical radio wave–based wireless telegraph system. This led to Marconi being credited as the inventor of radio, and winning the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun 'in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy.' His work laid the foundation for the development of radio, television, and all modern wireless communication systems." (Wikipedia HERE.)

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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FLASHBACK: "Death and Taxes," "On the Floor of the Library," and "Who Killed Who?"

WITH our 1,000th posting seven years ago we included a non-fact article, a not-so-serious essay about detective fiction, and a cartoon (HERE). All of the links seem to be working at the moment.

PUNCHed Out

THE sensational events of what came to be known as The Jack the Ripper Case were still fresh in everybody's memory when the satirical magazine PUNCH weighed in with this short piece. Since the official police didn't seem to be making any progress, the magazine's editors suggest replacements for those in charge of the investigation:

References and resources:

- "Mr. Wilkie Collins" - Wikipedia (HERE) and the GAD Wiki (HERE)

- "Miss Braddon" - Wikipedia (HERE) and The Victorian Web (HERE)

- "L. B. Farjeon" (should be "B. L. Farjeon") - Wikipedia (HERE) and the GAD Wiki (HERE).

- More about Jack the Ripper in Wikipedia (HERE), (HERE), and (HERE).

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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UPDATE: P. G. Wodehouse's "The Smile That Wins" (a.k.a. "Adrian Mulliner, Private Detective")

Changed original link to The Saint Detective Magazine at The Luminist Archives and a link to The Thrilling Detective website (HERE).

"I Don't Like Robot Waiters"

"The Deceivers."

(a.k.a. "Intent To Deceive").

By Larry Niven (born 1938).

Illustrated by Gaughan (1930-85; ISFDb HERE).

First appearance: Galaxy, April 1968.

Reprints page (ISFDb HERE).

Short short story (7 pages).

Online at The Luminist Archives (HERE; go to text page 148).

   "Waiters weren't invented. They evolved, like computers."

IF you had the experience that Lucas Garner claims he's had, you'd probably never want to look another robot or, for that matter, another shrimp cocktail in the face . . .

Main characters:

~ Lucas Garner ("was glaring his extreme distaste at a target which could only have been the robot waiter"), Lloyd Masney ("What's to get used to? They're waiters. They bring food"), the robot waiter ("was a standard make"), and Dreamer Glass ("There he was, knowing nothing about computers, but all ready to go out and sell them").

References and resources:

- "a Ray Bradbury Mars":

  "The Martian Chronicles is a science fiction fix-up novel, published in 1950, by American writer Ray Bradbury that chronicles the exploration and settlement of Mars, the home of indigenous Martians, by Americans leaving a troubled Earth that is eventually devastated by nuclear war." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "an Arm of the UN":

  "The ARM is the police force of the United Nations. ARM originated as an acronym for 'Amalgamation of Regional Militia' . . . Their basic function is to enforce mandatory birth control on overcrowded Earth, and restrict research which might lead to dangerous weapons. In short, the ARM hunts down women who have illegal pregnancies and suppresses all new technologies. They also hunt organleggers, especially in the era of the 'organ bank problem." (Wikipedia HERE.) Also see the Larry Niven Wiki (HERE).

- "the organ banks":

  "Organ theft is a common trope in science fiction and wider speculative fiction, having been popularized by the Known Space universe created by Larry Niven, where it is called 'organlegging', a portmanteau of 'organ' and 'bootlegging'. Due to organ transplantation becoming safe and universally effective, a huge potential black market in body parts was able to be exploited by murderous racketeers." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "a bigger and better automat":

  They've been around for quite a while:

  "An automat is a type of fast-food restaurant where food and drink are served through a vending machine, typically without waitstaff. The world's first automat, Quisisana, opened in Berlin, Germany in 1895." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "to get back in Quentin":

  Thanks mainly to the movies, it's one of the most famous lockups in the world:

  "Established in 1852, and opening in 1854, San Quentin is the oldest prison in California. The state's only death row for male inmates, the largest in the United States, was located at the prison. Its gas chamber has not been used since 1993, and its lethal injection chamber was last used in 2006. The prison has been featured on film, radio drama, video, podcast, and television; is the subject of many books; has hosted concerts; and has housed many notorious inmates." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "an endless supply of canapes Lorenzo":

  "The name [canape] comes from the French word for sofa, drawing on the analogy that the garnish sits atop the bread as people do on a sofa." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- Can all robots be considered trustworthy? Can any of them? A time traveler, his curvaceous companion, and an unsuspecting shipload of quarrelsome narcissists find out the hard way that, no, they can't be (HERE). You can see even more robots running amuck in this movie (WARNING! SPOILERS! HERE).

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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