James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars

James P. Hogan (1941-2010) was an English science fiction writer. Inherit the Stars, published in 1977, was his first novel. He later wrote four sequels. It has been described as a mystery-science fiction hybrid. Which it is, in a sort of a way. It’s not a whodunit type of mystery but the main thrust of the plot is the search for a solution to a puzzle. The methods used in weighing up evidence, interpreting the evidence and then fitting the clues together to find a solution do bear many resemblances to the methods used by detectives in the golden age of detective fiction.

The book is set in 2027. We get a brief background on the world of 2027 and this is by far the weakest part of the book. Hogan’s ideas on the directions that history might take are silly childish wishful thinking. Technology has solved all problems of scarcity and energy supply and the nations of the Earth have spontaneously decided to abandon nationalism and wars and to embrace a warm and fuzzy universal brotherhood under the benevolent leadership of the United Nations. All races and ethnicities have been erased. All religions have been abandoned. We are all one. It’s John Lennon’s Imagine come true.

With war abolished humanity has decided to embrace the Space Age with enthusiasm. Our future is in the stars! So it can be said to be an attempt to make such an enthusiasm seem plausible, since in 1977 Hogan must have been painfully aware that public interest in the space program had in fact evaporated almost entirely.

None of this nonsense matters once the story gets going. The mystery at the centre of the tale is Charlie (Charlie not being his name but the name that the scientists end up giving him). Charlie is dead. His body was found on the Moon. What makes it a mystery is that Charlie did not belong to any of the lunar colonies or expeditions. And he has been dead for 50,000 years. The real puzzle though is that Charlie is human. This is of course impossible. But nonetheless Charlie remains stubbornly human.

British scientist/inventor/ideas man/all-round genius Victor Hunt is one of the many scientists called in to solve the puzzle. Hunt’s most successful invention is the Trimagniscope which is a device that creates a holographic image of any object that it scans. The clever bit is that it can see inside objects as well. In 1977 this sounded very high-tech indeed. The device is going to be used not only to look inside Charlie’s body, but also to allow the two books which were fund with Charlie’s body to be read without having to open them (since they’re very fragile and would disintegrate if opened).

This is very much hard science fiction. There is zero characterisation. To me that’s no problem. I don’t read science fiction for character studies.

The entire plot is the gradual unraveling of the puzzle. Here we get another intriguing resemblance to detective fiction - as more and more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are found the picture gets clearer and clearer and then the next piece of evidence turns up and it doesn’t fit at all. Just as fictional detectives find themselves having to scrap elegant theories so the scientists have to do the same. Theory after theory gets discarded. The problem is not a lack of clues - there are plenty of clues but they all seem to point to radically different solutions.

Like any good writer of detective fiction Hogan delights in keeping his investigators on their toes. If they jump to conclusions they end up chasing down blind alleys. There are no red herrings as such. All the clues are real. They are all pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle but it’s like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle when you have no idea whatsoever what the final picture is going to be. It’s also, like a golden age detective story, a fair-play mystery. The clues necessary to solve the puzzle are available to the scientists, and to some extent to the reader (assuming he knows a certain amount about evolution, cosmology, vulcanology and planetary formation). The scientists certainly have the clues, but it takes a leap of intuition by Victor Hunt to see that the clues can only be assembled in one way that makes sense.

It’s also amusing that like so many detective novels it ends with the scientist-detective gathering everyone together to explain the solution to the mystery!

Not only does this book have much of the structure of a golden age detective story, it even has definite affinities with that fascinating sub-genre, the impossible crime story. There’s obviously no crime, but there are impossibilities that must be resolved.

It’s one of those hard SF novels that deals with Big Themes. Structurally it might be a mystery novel but thematically it’s unequivocally science fiction. The scope of the book is decidedly epic. Hogan stated in interviews that he was inspired to write Inherit the Stars after seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey. He loved the movie but hated the ending. He decided to try his hand at writing a novel with the same basic theme. There are definite plot similarities, and the feel is very similar. Arthur C. Clarke was known for his profound lack of interest in characterisation. Which by the way I agree with - I think characterisation is an unnecessary distraction in both science fiction and detective fiction. You could say that Inherit the Stars takes the initial premise of 2001 and then takes it in completely different directions. In fact it’s the kinship to detective fiction that differentiates it most sharply from 2001 - Hogan wants an ending that ties up all the loose ends.

Inherit the Stars is ideas-based science fiction and the ideas are genuinely interesting but it’s the slow, devious, tortuous and extremely clever unravelling of a complex puzzle that makes it enthralling. Highly recommended.