Randall Garrett 3 hr 54 min read

When a brilliant, self-aware supercomputer is found to have committed murder, it must be spirited off Earth to a distant world, and someone aboard the ship means to see the machine destroyed.

Randall Garrett's 1962 novel is a clever AI-and-space-opera mystery. Sharp, engaging, well-plotted. Read it for an inventive SF whodunit where a sentient computer with the innocence of a child is at the center of a murder mystery in space, blending detection, robotics, and Asimovian ethics, in a satisfying golden-age novel of machine minds and human crime.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

3 hr 54 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).