PREFACE
For thousands of years, an evolutionary arms-race has been going on between the guardians of the Law and those who want to break it. Usually, the criminals are a step or two ahead, thinking of clever new ways to Get Away With It—until the Law catches up with them, quite literally, and closes the clever new loopholes they've opened with new methods and techniques.
In the last hundred years, this arms-race has dramatically escalated, as new technologies have given surprising new weapons to those on either side of the Law—cars and airplanes on one hand, making it easier for criminals to get away, fingerprinting and DNA testing and instant worldwide communications, on the other hand, making it harder for them to avoid capture or identification.
Some of the battlefields didn't even exist only a few decades back. Forty years ago, there was no such thing as computer crime (because there was no such thing as computers, at least in the forms we know them today)—but there was also no such thing as the use of computers to investigate crime, either, a task at which they have proved awesomely effective.
So you win some, and you lose some. Take two steps forward, and then a step back.
And you ain't seen nothing yet!
As technology continues to increase in sophistication and power, so the opportunities to use that technology for crime will increase. In the high-speed future just ahead, we're likely to see crimes that don't even exist yet, as hightech criminals come up with whole new categories of crime that nobody has even thought of yet, here in the opening days of the twenty-first century—and the evolutionary arms-race will continue to escalate as well, at a faster pace than ever before, as the Law scrambles to come up with new ways to frustrate those bizarre new crimes and bring even the most technologically sophisticated criminals to justice.
So open the pages of this book, and let some of the world's most expert dreamers show you what the ancient game of Cops and Robbers is going to look like in the future, when high-tech identity theft, mutant con men, cyborg Mafia dons, murderous inventions, sinister Group Minds, people who kill for apartment space, sophisticated art thieves operating on the blazing surface of Mercury, and many other now-unknown crimes (including futures where you could be breaking the law by urinating . . . or by being late for work!) are the things that must be combated by the equally high-tech detectives of the future. So break out your spacesuit and your Virtual Reality set, your time-shuttle, your laser gun, and your faithful robot Watson, and get ready to solve some science fiction mysteries that are literally out of this world—sometimes way out. The game is afoot! Enjoy!
(For more speculations about future crime of one sort or another, check out our Ace anthologies Hackers, Clones, Nanotech, and Genometry.)