In Murder at the End of the World, main character Darby Hart is a true-crime junkie who wrote a book about a cold case she helped crack. That notoriety earned her a spot at a billionaire Andy Ronson’s Icelandic apocalypse bunker, where he is essentially hosting a mastermind group. The esteemed group includes a roboticist, a climatologist, a filmmaker, a human rights activist, an astronaut (with a medical degree), and… Darby’s former crime-solving partner, now an outspoken activist against reckless technology.

It’s a mystery story, so someone dies. I want to tread lightly around spoilers, so I’m going to focus on the scifi element at play.

Andy Ronson and his family live in an AI-powered smarthome. It’s buried underground, in the glaciers of Iceland, fulfilling the cozy mystery role oft played by country mansions and ships in international waters. But the AI is voice-activated, security-sensitive, and present throughout (almost) all the house. Which is where things get interesting.

In the 1990s, mysteries experienced a system shock. Cell phones ruined so many standard assumptions and tropes. Writers started stranding motorists in remote regions where cell service could believably be absent, but that became limiting. Eventually, writers learned to use the technology as part of the mystery, not bemoan it as a killjoy.

(Side Note: imagine thinking that the existence of a non-smart cellphone would make crimes trivially easy to solve.)

I feel like AI and surveillance are set up to be the next generation of that problem. How do you solve a crime (in an interesting, dramatic way) when you can just ask an AI? How do you preserve mystery when there are cameras, card swipes, and door logs?

These are the questions that will plague a new generation of mystery writers, and I feel like Murder at the End of the World has taken a great shot at answering. The smarthome and its built-in custom AI assistant aren’t an impediment to the plot or danced around to the point of pretending it doesn’t exist. The writers integrated it in such a way that without it, the investigation would have looked completely different.

Good writing involves taking constraints and challenges and adapting to them, not finding ways to ignore them. It’s easy to go back to writing stories set in the mid-20th Century so as not to deal with cell phones, computers, and the internet era in general. But to write one set in the 2020s takes at least a token acknowledgment of the tech-of-the-day.

A billionaire and his intellectual cronies gather. Someone dies. How does Darby use everyone’s (including Ray, the smarthome AI) unique skills, perspectives, and circumstances to solve the murder? The sci-fi is so near future that the strangest factor may soon be that we never see the datacenter melting the glaciers around them.

At the time of this post, you can check out Murder at the End of the World on Hulu.