Before the nineteen-fifties, many critics considered the science fiction mystery novel an improbability—if not an impossibility…. [It was assumed] that both detective fiction and science fiction are frivolous literary forms and that both are too limited in scope and techniques to permit fusion between them….

[But, an examination of the two genres] would have noted the intellectual openness of both genres and emphasized that the spirit behind both is that of inquiry, of the willingness to use reason to explore all possibilities. It would have pointed out, moreover, the ways in which writers of both genres have striven to get beyond the conditioning of their societies and to overcome mind sets. (p. 109)

Given the openness and liberating attitudes of both detective fiction and science fiction, one would have been justified in predicting their fusion—and Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester and Stanislaw Lem have amply confirmed any such...