Crime in Cabot Cove: 'Murder, She Wrote,' reconsidered

My brother and I recently had a discussion about Larry Niven's Known Space books that somehow meandered its way into the teevee show "Murder, She Wrote."  

Don't ask me how we managed that transition. I can't see any connection between the Ringworld and Jessica Fletcher, though I must admit that the thought of a few kzinti running around Cabot Cove is one that brings a warm smile to my heart. 

Anyway, we fell to discussing the curious coincidence that so many people die around mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher.  Our ideas ranged from her simply living in a neck of the woods with an unusually high rate of murders, to the possibility that she was under a curse inherited from her grandfather, who defiled an ancient mummy's tomb, along with some more chilling possibilities.  My brother developed the thought substantially after our discussion, and I now share the result with you:

For years now, the people of Cabot Cove have been dropping dead, left and right.  All except for a certain Jessica Fletcher and her friends. (Some of whom are members of the local constabulary!)

The phenomenon isn't limited to Cabot Cove though.  Everywhere Ms. Fletcher goes, there always seems to be a suspicious death of some sort.  In fact, on a few occasions, it's even seemed likely that Ms. Fletcher herself was responsible for the deaths and suspicion has only been diverted from her at the last moment.

Quite an interesting string of coincidences, huh?  Most interesting of all, nobody has ever conducted an investigation into this string of happenstance -- remember up above, where I mentioned that some of Ms. Fletcher's friends were members of the local police force?

Recently, a young FBI agent noticed the string of murders following Ms. Fletcher around the world.  He came into Cabbot Cove a few days ago, investigating the possibility that Jessica Fletcher was in fact a major East Coast crime boss.

His theory was that Ms. Fletcher created elaborate scenarios for her murder mystery books and then, in order to test how believable the stories were, would hire two-bit out-of-town hoods to do the actual dirty work.  If she were ever implicated, one of Ms. Fletcher's lieutenants would step in and allow him- or herself to be "caught" in some incriminating circumstance. Ms. Fletcher would then hire a team of hotshot lawyers and said lieutenant would be back on the streets within six months.

This morning, the FBI agent, Mulder by name, was found floating dead in the harbor.

Single-person narrative

Have you ever tried to write a story in which there is only one character, all by herself?  I've been working on such a story and am finding it more difficult than I have ever imagined to give the story any grip.  Stories are interesting because of some central conflict, and it's bugger-all difficult to have a conflict with only one character (unless she's schizo or something, and this one isn't).

Has anyone out there ever written or read a story in which there is only one character at all?  Was the story a success?  I'm curious to know if I'm the only one who has trouble doing this.

A solution to the Wesley problem we can all support

Ways to Cure the Wesley Problem

1. While visiting a starbase on the planet of the Guardian of Forever, the crew of the Enterprise is horrified to find the rest of the universe change around them.  Due to his Star Fleet training and knowledge of history, Wesley is chosen for the special mission of going back in time as a redshirt who beams down to a planet with Captain Kirk and takes a bullet meant for him.
2. The Borg make Wesley their new speaker, and Captain Picard is forced to conclude that rescuing him from the Borg cube would unnecessarily endanger the Enterprise crew.  He is given a hero's funeral when the Borg cube is destroyed.
3. In engineering, the photon torpedoes are stuck and Wesley is forced to activate them manually from inside the tubes.  As he gives the order to fire torpedoes, Picard remarks on the needs of the many "outweighing the needs of the few."
4. Another of Wesley's science experiments develops into a lifeform on an episode called "Frankenstein."  In a chilling scene, his science projects says, "You are my creator, but I am your master--obey!" After his science project kills his girlfriend, Wesley chases it all the way to Pluto where they both crashland and freeze to death.
5. As part of a fraternity prank at Star Fleet Academy, someone sticks a phaser, set to overload, under Wesley's pillow one night.
6. Wesley is transferred to Deep Space Nine and is killed when thousands of rioting Star Trek fans, angered that the show has broken with formula and is not set on a starship, rampage through the set in the final episode.

Roddenberry's literary inspiration for Trek names

Here's an item of interest for people wondering where the names come  from for Star Trek characters.

It should be common knowledge that all of the character names in Classic Star Trek, including Spock, were stolen from the pages of the early, less widely known, works of Shakespeare.

New research indicates that previous drafts of Macbeth featured a Scottish king named Kirk who was murdered by the Thane of Cawdor, an enterprising man named MacCoy. also the working title of the play.

Toward the end of the play, Lady MacCoy throws a beggar out of the castle, crying, "Out, out, damn Spock!"  The pretender king, MacCoy, is killed in a brutal sword fight with a Scotsman called "Scotty." In later drafts, his name was changed to MacDuff.

We all (or many of us, at least) have heard about Jordi LaForge, the disabled Star Trek fan for whom Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge is named.  And many of us also have heard that Jean-Luc Picard is named, in part, after Jean Piccard, a French balloonist.  (There is also a Jean Picard, a French astronomer noted for calculating the size of the earth.) And of course Wesley was named after Roddenberry himself, whose given name was Wesley Eugene.

Well, here's something else to add to the trivia:

pulaski: a single-bit axe with an adze-shaped hoe extending from the back
(Courtesy of Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary)

I don't know if it's significant, but it struck me as interesting to find out that "pulaski" is actually a word and not just a name.

Add that to other useless name trivia about the origins of names like "Hikaru" (means the Shining One, see Vonda Mackintyre's "The Entropy Effect" for more info.), "Mr Atoz" ("A to Z," appropriate for a librarian) and N'gilam ("Malign" backwards).

Nyota Uhuru (or Uhura, depending on the transliteration) is Swahili for "Star Freedom."

Pavel Chekov was the name of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's father.

I think — and this is mostly a guess — that the name of Leonard McCoy comes from a short story by Kafka called "Just a Plain Old Country Doctor."

That's all I can think of right now.

Star Trek: Transporters and the ethics of beaming aboard

Transporters are such a basic part of Star Trek technology that their use is almost automatic. Need to get to the planet? Beam on down. Need to return to the ship in a hurry? Beam on up.

Convenience aside, there's something to be said for in-world examination of their ethics. In "The Savage Curtain," Kirk explains that the transporters disassembles a person on one end and then reassembles them atom by atom on the other. Scant and nontechnical as that is, it's still got to raise questions.

In James Blish's "Spock Must Die," Dr. McCoy raises the moral question of "Is transporting someone murder?" If someone is disassembled, then there is at least a nanosecond where she does not exist. Under such a situation, she would be dead, and all that is left of the crew member is a sort of soulless zombie walking around on the planet.

In "Spock's World," author Diane Duane suggests another model of how they work. Transporters don't disassemble matter, they convert it into energy, which they transmit to a destination, where the energy is shows how transporters can be used for storing food so it won't go stale.  You just store the energy patterns of the food, and convert it back into its physical form whenever you want to.

These books, and a couple others such as "Fate of the Phoenix," indicate that the transporter "memorizes" the energy subject's resonances, converts the object into energy and then duplicates it on the planet below.

Meanwhile, in "Fate of the Phoenix," the villain Black Omne uses transporter technology to make duplicates of other people (and himself).  So, if I go through his transporter, he can now make dozens of duplicates of me by using another energy source to duplicate my energy pattern -- a sort of immortality, especially if it's done an instant before death.

I'm surprised this hasn't been dealt with more in Star Trek. If you've got a big enough energy source, you can duplicate one person millions of times and send him/them against an enemy force.

Can you imagine what Star Fleet would have been like with a Kirk and Spock on every starship?

There are lot of moral and legal questions can spring up around the transporter as it works in the series. Still, in a "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode, the Enterprise encounters the ruins of an advanced civilization with transporter technology that avoids this problem.

With Ionian technology, the person to be transported simply steps through a virtual door and emerges on the other side. In a sense, that arrangement would be ideal, as it does not involve duplicating a crew member or destroying either copy.

On the other hand,  what if the doorway is set for null coordinates? What happens then? I'd hate to spend the rest of eternity in transport, in some timeless dimension. Brr. Gives me as many willies thinking about that as being killed every time I transport.

No wonder McCoy hated the blasted things so much.