Thursday, July 23, 2009

Sci-fi and crime: What's the connection?

A post about mystery and the moon earlier this week elicited some interesting examples of crime fiction with a space theme or setting as well as the information, new to me, that Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, two science-fiction giants, had written mysteries as well. I also had never known that John D. MacDonald wrote science fiction.

So here's a question: What, other than money, might dispose a crime writer to turn to science fiction or vice versa? What features do the genres share, or is it just a matter of certain writers' simply liking to work in both forms?

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Late addition: B.V. Lawson's In Reference to Murder blog adds Stanislaw Lem to the roster of science-fiction/crime-fiction boundary jumpers with his novel The Chain of Chance.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

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