Guest Post - Tim Major talks Universal Language
Hellooo!
Hope you had a lovely long weekend. Yesterday I reviewed Universal Language - The Airlocked Room Mystery by Tim Major and Tim has very kindly written a post about this the inspiration for this really good novella out today from Newcon Press
The starting point for my novella Universal Language was a one-sentence idea scribbled in a notebook: An airlocked room mystery. That is, a murder victim discovered in a room sealed by an airlock from the outside. Already, this concept betrays a bundle of influences, from classic locked-room mysteries to golden-age SF. I suppose you could call this a genre mashup, though that strikes me as a slightly blunter approach. The way I saw it was simply that it’d be fun to transpose the rulesets of the mystery genre into an SF context.
In the past I’ve written several short stories set on Mars – or rather, a particular vision of Mars, featuring dilapidated settlements, idiosyncratic colonists and their failing technology, and a very British sensibility. In themselves, these stories were a sort of tribute act echoing Ray Bradbury’s stories that were collected as The Martian Chronicles, substituting my own nostalgia-fuelled vision of life on Mars for his. I think I’ve always been interested in Mars, which seems far more remote and unknowable than the Moon, but which is secured as strongly in our shared imaginations. There’s always been a strange sense of nostalgia and projection in our attitude to the planet, too. In 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli identified ‘channels’ on Mars, and this was subsequently mistranslated into English as ‘canals’, it was widely accepted as making perfect sense that Martians might have the same impulses of construction as we humans.
In narrative terms, part of the appeal of setting stories within a small Mars colony is the fixed cast of characters. In that sense, a murder mystery seems an easy fit, providing an array of suspects within a society perhaps less fluid than the ones we’re used to here on Earth. And SF concepts can provide new, tantalising hooks, too. For example, the sole suspect of the murder in Universal Language is a servile ‘aye-aye’ robot, whose Asimovian rules governing its behaviour make the act of murder impossible.
I’ve always been a plotter, a planner, in my writing. I’ve always enjoyed seeding information early on that becomes relevant much later. In that sense, it’s a surprise that it’s taken me so long to write an honest-to-goodness mystery. (Now the floodgates are open, though: after Universal Language, my next two novels will be Sherlock Holmes mysteries.) Often, the most satisfying aspect of plotting a novel is in setting yourself a puzzle and then attempting to untangle it; this applies even more to mysteries, and locked-room mysteries most of all. My favourite locked-room mystery is The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr, along with a handful of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories and Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin tales, now repopularised since the terrific updated TV version available on Netflix. I wouldn’t dare claim that my novella works anything like as well as those examples, but I certainly had a lot of fun layering complexity over two simple questions: How could a robot who can’t harm humans perform a murder? And if not the robot, then how could a human murderer pass through a locked door and an airless vacuum?
It was even more fun finding out the answer.
