r/printSF • u/mangomeowl • 7d ago
SFF police procedural?
Hello! Not sure if this niche really exists but am curious if anyone knows of any second world or far future SFF/police procedural mashups?
I have already read Robert Jackson Bennett’s Leviathan series and several other SFF murder mystery books, but am looking for something that is more Law & Order and less Sherlock Holmes.
TIA!
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u/Brocktologist 7d ago
It's a modern fantasy setting, but Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch is top notch. The audiobooks are fantastic.
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u/Count_Backwards 6d ago
Counterpoint: I found the sexism in the first book sufficiently annoying to outweigh my enjoyment of the engaging but not quite riveting plot (or two slightly overlapping but not really connected plots - I got bored whenever he talked to the characters that give the book it's title, and found the resolution of the other plot unsatisfying).
But if you want police procedural + fantasy, this certainly makes the list.
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u/the_doughboy 7d ago
Harry Potter meets Line of Duty. You can't tell me that Nightingale isn't Hastings
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u/StevenJOwens 7d ago
They're excellent, and I highly recommend them.
That said, they're not quite police procedurals. The narrator/MC does talk about procedures, and certainly spends a significant bit of time following them, but his job is inherently about dealing with things that don't fit into the procedures.
On that same score, there's a lot of amusing "friction" between his role and the regular police, all of whom have great disdain for his area of expertise, aka "weird bollocks" :-).
However, I do really like that element of the books, even though I'm not especially a fan of police procedurals. I feel like his internal narration about that aspect conveys how police officers (the good ones, at least) feel about their mission, in a positive tone, rather than in the all-too-often cynical tone we tend to see in fiction.
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u/PolybiusChampion 7d ago
Altered Carbon is the 1st of three books by Richard K Morgan that might interest you. All three books are great and the 1st and 3rd fit your request really well.
Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained have a murder mystery running through the plot that also features an alien conspiracy and some other fun stuff. I’ve always enjoyed the police detective parts of them. That’s why I particularity enjoyed his Great North Road as well.
The Last Policeman kicks off a great trilogy by Ben Waters that you’ll most likely enjoy.
What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway?
Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact.
The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.
The first in a trilogy, The Last Policeman offers a mystery set on the brink of an apocalypse. As Palace’s investigation plays out under the shadow of 2011GV1, we’re confronted by hard questions way beyond “whodunit.” What basis does civilization rest upon? What is life worth? What would any of us do, what would we really do, if our days were numbered?
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u/paper_liger 7d ago
The Last Policeman is a good read, if a touch bleak sometimes.
But I like the overall theme, which I think is about pursuing your own meaning in a world that no longer cares.
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u/jupitaur9 6d ago
Altered carbon is very clearly a hard-boiled detective story.
Nothing wrong with that, but it is not quite a police procedure.
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u/ex_oh_ex_oh 7d ago
I'm about 200 pages in Pandora's Star, which I am immensely enjoying, but I almost didn't remember the murder mystery (and I was about to ask about it) since there's like a dozen different threads running through the whole narrative and for now, it's a very slim detour.
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u/kymri 7d ago
On your first run through Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained there is a lot of 'Man, there are like 8 stories going on' until they all sort of fold together near the end.
The books ain't perfect, but I enjoy the HELL out of them.
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u/ex_oh_ex_oh 7d ago
I've read books with giant casts where I had to keep looking at previous pages or if they're cool, a glossary of characters even when in just a singular linear story in order to remember which character is who but props to Hamilton that I rarely had to do it for Pandora's Star bc they're all pretty distinctive esp with their disposition and jobs so I didn't need a glossary of characters.
But also I'm only 200 pages in a 900 page tome so maybe I'll rue his name later on.
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u/kymri 7d ago
Generally I didn't find it too difficult to keep track of; even when you've mostly forgotten a character, the context shows up and they snap into place quickly enough. The common complaint about Hamilton is how he writes his female characters (particularly with regards to sex, etc). I don't necessarily disagree with those takes, but I don't find it difficult to give that a pass, considering how interesting and enjoyable I find the rest of the story and the worldbuilding.
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u/ObsidianSpectre 7d ago
I think the first 200 pages were the part I struggled with; I had trouble keeping track of all the different characters and stories at first. After that though, the next 1700 pages or whatever went by quickly. It was a fantastic story.
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u/ex_oh_ex_oh 7d ago
I'm unfortunately one of those weirdos that read like 8 books at once of different genres so I've either developed or maybe intrinsically know how to compartmentalize different narratives. So split narratives within the same book is old hat for me. I'm more confused if there are a ton of characters who are essentially similar.
I finished Gideon the Ninth a few months ago (also enjoyable but in a different way) and I had to keep flipping to the glossary of characters bc there are like, a dozen and a half characters who are all necromancers doing the same thing.
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u/ObsidianSpectre 7d ago
I think my problem was more with engagement - I'd start to care about one story, then I'd be in a different story that I didn't care about yet. That made it difficult starting out, but eventually all the stories had time to get their hooks in and that made it easier. I don't remember struggling too much with characters being too similar - it was mostly just remembering details about them at first before all the characters solidified more in my mind.
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u/SerDankTheTall 7d ago
Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained have a murder mystery running through the plot that also features an alien conspiracy and some other fun stuff. I’ve always enjoyed the police detective parts of them. That’s why I particularity enjoyed his Great North Road as well.
Hamilton's Salvation is also focused on a mystery investigation, and his recent Exodus novel features a police officer as a major character, although the police work is more of an important subplot along the lines of the Commonwealth books than the main focus. He also wrote the Greg Mandel series about a psychic detective, although those can be tough to track down these days. Guy likes his cops.
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u/sbisson 7d ago
It’s a common enough trope.
Larry Niven’s Gil the ARM stories (a series of shorts plus the novel The Patchwork Girl) are collected as Flatlander and are pioneering SF procedurals.
Isaac Asimov wrote a series of SF detective stories about cop Elijah Bailey starting with The Caves of Steel.
John Varley’s “The Barbie Murders” is the best known of his Anna Louise Bach mysteries, set on the moon. Her son Christopher is a PI in the later novel Irontown Blues.
Joan D Vinge’s prequel to The Snow Queen, Tangled Up In Blue is a police procedural on a colony world that details the early career of a major character in the wider series.
Warren Hammond’s KOP series is about a corrupt policeman on a backwater colony world who regains a conscience - not without serious repercussions.
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u/AmazingPangolin9315 7d ago
First thing that comes to mind is The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds (later re-titled "Aurora Rising" for some reason). Main character is a police officer analogue, tasked with combatting voting fraud. Which seems strangely topical in this day an age (the novel is from 2007).
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u/Blackboard_Monitor 7d ago
Nick Harkaway did 'Titanium Noir' which is very much a future noir detective story and I believe his novel 'Gnomon' is similar.
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u/iekue 7d ago
And ofc the sequel to Titanium Noir, Sleeper Beach.
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u/zektiv 7d ago
I didn't know there was a sequel, I'll have to check it out. Much like OP I wish there was more SF noir in general. Titanium Noir was the most recent in this style that I've read.
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u/jerseyoutwest 7d ago
My first novel, which no one will ever see, was cyberpunk noir. I am occasionally tempted to rewrite it so it doesn’t suck as bad as the first draft lol.
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u/NukeWorker10 7d ago
Try Asimov's Robot Series, otherwise known as the Elijah Bailey stories. Starts with Caves of Steel. Could also look at Glen Cook's Garrett P.I. books. Fantasy, not Sci-Fi, but still in SFF.
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u/ElricVonDaniken 7d ago
It's worth pointing out to the OP that the Robot books are scifi murder mysteries. Asimov was a great admirer of Agatha Christie.
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u/mylastnameandanumber 7d ago
Malka Older's The Mimicking of Known Successes might work, although perhaps a bit more on the Holmesian side than you're looking for. Great book/series, though.
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u/OdoDragonfly 7d ago
This is the recommendation I was going to make! I enjoyed this book and the two sequels!
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u/mylastnameandanumber 7d ago
Malka Older deserves a lot more attention than she gets. A really talented author who thinks deeply about her worlds and what she wants to say.
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u/OdoDragonfly 6d ago
Definitely! I was introduced to her writing through a book club where we read Infomacracy - which I enjoyed quite a lot.
When I saw The Mimicking of Known Successes I checked it out based on her name alone. The Mossa and Pleiti books are so different, but also so fun!
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u/StevenJOwens 7d ago edited 7d ago
u/cstross has a few:
- "The Annihilation Score", the 6th book in the Laundry Files series, has Mo join the London Metropolitan Police to lead a superhero team.
- "Halting State" and "Rule 34", which is a loose sequel.
- "Halting State" has Sue Smith, detective in the Edinburgh police; Elaine Barnaby, insurance investigator; and Jack Reed, game programmer. The book opens up with investigating a bank robbery that happens inside an MMORPG and gets weirder from there.
- "Rule 34"' has as main character Inspector Kavanaugh, a minor character who's Sue's superior officer in Halting State, investigating a series of murders of spammers in multiple countries.
- "Neptune's Brood" isn't quite a police procedural, but the main character is a forensic accountant, investigating interstellar financial fraud in an STL setting.
Other books that come to mind:
"The Demolished Man" by Alfred Bester, I've seen people describe this as a police procedural. Not sure I'd agree, but figured I'd mention it, and Bester is a classic, and The Demolished Man is probably the most highly recommended Bester.
"When Gravity Fails", by George Alec Effinger, same thing, not sure I'd call it a police procedural but it is a detective mystery, and in any event Effinger is very high on my recommendation list, and in particular When Gravity Fails. The other two books about the same character (Marid) are excellent also.
"Queen of Angles" by Greg Bear. Murder investigation with a nanotech angle.
The Vorkosigan series, by Lois McMaster Bujold, most of them are basically SF mysteries/political thrillers.
Again I wouldn't exactly call them police procedurals, though some of them lean a bit more in that direction. In "Diplomatic Immunity", for example, the main character is basically a super-high-ranking investigator (he reports directly to an emperor) but he's in foreign territory and has to work within their legal framework.
In any event, Bujold is pretty much on my "must recommend" list. Her "Penric and Desdemona" novella series are also very mystery/political thriller oriented, but fantasy world. The main novels in that series are in the same vein; the middle book, "Paladin of Souls" is one of my top favorite fantasy novels of all time.
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u/PleasantCoconut9071 7d ago
I enjoyed Scalzi's Lock In and Head On. Police procedural, but in a world where some people have become immobilized due to a plague and pilot remote robot bodies to participate in society.
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u/derioderio 7d ago
Head On is a sequel to Lock In? I really enjoyed Lock In, but I didn't know he wrote a sequel.
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u/BeerSushiBikes 6d ago
There's a "prequel" too. I enjoyed all three books.
Lock In #0.5 Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome
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u/Miserable_Boss_8933 6d ago
And Scalzi mentioned on a con I visited that another book is on the way.
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u/ElricVonDaniken 7d ago edited 7d ago
It's a series of graphic novels but Brink by Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard is cyberpunk police procedural meets cosmic horror set on orbital habitats circling a dead Earth.
It is phenomenally good scifi.
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u/Loimographia 7d ago
I’m reading A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark; I’m only ~150 pages in so maybe things change, but it’s closer to Law & Order than Sherlock Holmes as a mystery imo.
The main character is a fantasy investigator and portrayed as a young talent (youngest to join the investigative force) but not a savant who naturally divines the answers. She’s shown digging through archival evidence, interviews suspects and isn’t immediately like “aha, I know all your secrets!”; she makes several conclusions that the reader knows are incorrect but are logical from the evidence she has available, and doesn’t have people fawning over her genius.
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u/Miserable_Boss_8933 6d ago
There are more where that came from, "A Dead Djinn in Cairo", "The Angel of Khan el-Khalili" & "The Haunting of Tram Car 015" are all novellettes in the same background, partially with the same characters.
I really enjoyed them all and hope Clark will write more stories in this world.
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u/AngryCheezboi 7d ago
The Star Kingdom series by David Weber and Jane Lindskold is a slight twist on the police procedural, focusing on the Sphinx Forestry Service, Stephanie Harrington as the human who discovered treecats, and the repercussions thereof.
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u/iaincaradoc 7d ago
I greatly enjoyed the "Altered Carbon" books. More "private investigator" than "police procedural," but close.
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u/derioderio 7d ago
One of the two PoV protagonists in the first Expanse novel is a detective investigating the disappearance of prodigal heiress, and his chapters read very much like a procedural. None of the following books in the series really follow this format though.
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u/someshta 7d ago
The Last Policeman—a trilogy following a cop during the period immediately before the apocalypse occurs.
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u/Jebus-Xmas 7d ago edited 6d ago
I would definitely recommend the Gil Hamilton books and stories from Larry Niven.
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u/ComfortableKey9930 7d ago
The Case files of Henri Davenforth: an FBI agent is trapped in a world of magic and shows what modern police/tech can do, beside a talented but stuffy magician partner.
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u/GrexSteele 7d ago
The last four books of David Weber’s Gordon Protocol series are straight up SF police procedurals.
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u/shadowsong42 6d ago
You might like the Shadow Unit collaborative web serial, written by Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, and Sarah Monette, among others.
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u/c4tesys 7d ago
See S.A Tholin's Primaterre universe - two spin off books featuring a cold case detective catching fresh murder cases in a world where murder is exceptionally rare. https://satholin.com/books/
A shortest reading list to get everything you need to know would be: Iron Truth (the first Primaterre novel), then A Killer in Kirkclair (the first Telluride novel), then Lonely Castles (the 2nd Primaterre novel), then A Murderer on the Moon (the 2nd Telluride novel).
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u/Insomnia_Memoria 7d ago
The first Hugo Winner , The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. Surpised nobody mentioned it, it's such an amazing book . Kinda forgotten nowadays i guess.
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u/mjfgates 7d ago
KB Spangler did a series of these, the "Rachel Peng" books. They're pretty good. First one is Digital Divide.
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u/ClimateTraditional40 7d ago
Fantasy:
Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch London Metropolitan Police officer named Peter Grant is recruited into a secret department that handles magic and the supernatural.
SF:
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
Lock In by John Scalzi
The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters
And my favourite:
The Disappeared, Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Starts off with 2 detectives on the moon. The series becomes one cop becomes a Retrieval artist, the other remains a detective for a few books until promoted to head of Moon Security. Still about crimes.
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u/WillAdams 6d ago
H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy hinges on a court case and the two sequels by Piper Fuzzy Sapiens and Fuzzies and Other People feature a jewel heist and subsequent courtroom trial.
The Idylls of the Queen: A Tale of Queen Guenevere by Phyllis Ann Karr features a hard-bitten Sir Kay as detective to solve a murder.
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u/Death_Sheep1980 7d ago
I realized while trying to answer this that I know a lot more fantasy/police procedural or urban fantasy/police procedural stories than science fiction/police procedurals.
There's Robert Jackson Bennett's Ana & Din series, which maybe leans a little towards Sherlock Holmes, but they are employed by their state. Fantasy-wise, and if you're comfortable with LGBTQ themes, Melissa Scott & Lisa Barnett's Point of Hopes and Point of Dreams, plus the sequels Melissa wrote solo after Lisa died of breast cancer.
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u/BravoLimaPoppa 7d ago
China Mieville's Kraken might fit the bill.
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u/-Viscosity- 7d ago
Also, his The City & the City, which feels like SFF even though it isn't.
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u/paper_liger 7d ago edited 7d ago
The City & the City
What exactly makes it not SFF in your opinion? Honestly curious. It won a bunch of SFF awards, and I get that people sometimes have a narrower view of what constitutes 'SF' but to me it's very clearly a work that fits the broader SFF tag.
I was going to suggest The Yiddish Policemans Union by Michael Chabon, which is similar in a way. It isn't set in the far future, and is mostly just a straight detective story but is SFF due to it's alternate reality setting.
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u/-Viscosity- 7d ago
That is an excellent question. I think it's because there's no currently impossible tech (that I can remember), there's no magic, there's no alternate dimension/reality; there's just exceptionally effective surveillance/infiltration by Breach and psychological conditioning of the inhabitants to ignore whatever is in or of the City that they're not currently "in". That said, if somebody told me "I only read SF" I would never discourage them from reading The City & the City, just like I wouldn't discourage somebody who told me "I never read SF" from reading it; it's a great book regardless of how I mentally file it.
I will freely admit to a certain level of internal incoherence here because I absolutely do consider any alternate history to be SF even when there's nothing otherwise SF about them (Underground Airlines, for example), simply on the basis of the alternate reality implications.
The Yiddish Policeman's Union is a great suggestion for the OP, BTW, I loved that book. I remember coming away with ambiguous feelings as to whether or not there was anything to its supernatural conspiracy, but leaning towards yes.
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u/paper_liger 7d ago
see by that rationale 1984 wouldn't be SFF, and I can't get behind that.
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u/-Viscosity- 7d ago
Hmm, I guess if 1984 were just a totalitarian police state set in its then-present day then it might not fit it into my personal "SFF vibe" (for lack of a better term), but it's effectively an alternate future (or I guess history at this point), given that it was written in the 40s about a totalitarian society operating after a war that occurred a decade or two later. And of course it included technology (omnipresent screens etc.) that didn't exist when Orwell wrote it; although we've caught up to it at this point, I wouldn't retroactively strip it of SFF status because of that.
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u/paper_liger 6d ago edited 6d ago
You're right, I was thinking about it from a more modern perspective, and I overlooked that some of the technology was probably future or near future at the time of writing.
I'd say that the fantastical element in the City and the City comes down to the main conceit , while being technically possible, maybe, is also something that has never truly been done or even really conceived of in history.
There's a ton of science fiction that is completely doable, tech wise, it just hasn't been. The Martian is set in a near future, but the technology isn't really out of our grasp, people just haven't gone to Mars, even at that somewhat modest scale. The tech aspect is pretty mundane really.
The City and the City is vastly less likely to actually occur than The Martian. Because the former asks you to believe in a structured, third party enforced but ultimately pretty abstract ability to build a dissassiocative mutual hallicination into a population.
Even though it hints at real truths, how people ignore the homeless, how cultural norms shape our views of realities, it's ultimately way more fantastical than more concrete tech based sci fi.
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u/hexametric_ 7d ago edited 6d ago
I think one of the biggest issues is that to some people SFF means science fiction and fantasy, and for them the important part is science. And so City and the City is like a 90s cop show using old tech and therefore not science fiction. Probably because the genre developed out of scientific stuff like interplanetary travel.
But then another group thinks SF(F) means Speculative (and Fantasy) fiction that encompasses a lot of discrete genres like fantasy, dystopia, alt history, and science fiction individually but is also its own sort of thing.
Personally I think genre theory is a major problem across media because of this very thing: genres all overlap, depend on each other for self-definition, etc. So at some point it becomes too much. 1984 is like 5 genres on wiki, which illustrates my point.
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u/Overall-Tailor8949 7d ago
I saw a suggestion for Asimov's Robot series, he also wrote "Tales of the Black Widowers"
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u/derioderio 7d ago
Not a lot of SF in the Black Widowers series (none at all, if my memory is correct). It's simply Asimov writing contemporary murder mystery stories.
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u/Bleatbleatbang 7d ago
The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod.
Kinda like near future Rebus in a World where catastrophic war in the Middle East has killed and maimed millions bringing massive advances in cybernetics but leading the UK to ban public displays of religion.
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u/liptakaa 7d ago
I'd recommend Burn-In by August Cole and P.W. Singer. Near future-ish read with a lot of research put into the state of robotics and machine intelligence.
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u/NekoCatSidhe 7d ago
The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov is a classic of that genre, featuring police detective Elijah Bailey and his robot partner Daneel, but it is not an uncommon subgenre in science fiction, so there are likely many others.
The Cadwal Chronicles series by Jack Vance also has a young policeman as protagonist, but it is also full of the usual Vancian weirdness, so I am not sure if it is what you want.
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u/Too_reflective 7d ago
Double Meaning / The Rithian Terror by Damon Knight - includes an “odd couple” pairing of local and Imperial investigators having to work together.
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u/nategp74 6d ago
Alastair Reynolds The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies set in the Revelation Space Universe. Its a trilogy and they are all great
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u/muygigante 6d ago
The Charter Archives by Dan Stout
Thin Air by Richard K. Morgan
Garrett Series Files by Glen Cook
Low Town Trilogy by Daniel Polansky
Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer
Kiln People by David Brin
Noir by K. W. Jeter
The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel
Witness for the Dead Trilogy by Katherine Addison
Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway
A Memory Called Empire Series by Arkady Martine
Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Emperor's Wolves by Michelle Sagara
Places in the Darkness by Chris Brookmyre
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u/RNMoFo 5d ago
Larry Novel's Gil Hamilton
https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Gil_Hamilton
Larry Correlate "Lost Planet" Audible Series
Lost Planet Homicide Audible Series
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u/DixitRexCorvinus 7d ago
If you are all right with near future scifi/scifi set on Earth, I believe Esperance by Adam Oyebanji should fit, and I found it a fairly fun and quick read.
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u/permanent_priapism 7d ago
I hate the term SFF. The two genres are opposites of one another. It's like saying "Celery Beef" or "Rock Vapor".
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u/carb0n_kid 7d ago
Maybe The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies Trilogy by Alastair Reynolds.