Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #10. Arthur Conan Doyle
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Others agree. For instance, E.J. Wagner, whose book The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective’s Greatest Cases recounts how Holmes influenced generations of forensic scientists in the same way that Star Trek later influenced physicists and engineers, says, “Sherlock Holmes may have been fictional, but what we learn from him is very real. He tells us that science provides not simplistic answers but a rigorous method of formulating questions that may lead to answers. The figure of Holmes stands for human reason, tempered with a gift for friendship.”
Ryan Britt, in “Sherlock Holmes and the Science Fiction of Deduction,” published in the science fiction publication Clarkesworld Magazine, seems to concur: “Essentially, Holmes believes any mystery can be approached, and a solution deduced, scientifically, by gathering necessary data, and drawing conclusions based on logic and reason. In the Doyle stories, the science of deduction usually always works, and serves as the basic premise for every single Holmes adventure. Like a science fiction writer, Doyle seemed to start with the premise of ‘what if?’.”
If the Holmes canon as a whole represents a science fiction sensibility, specific stories within the series qualify as science fiction proper. The most obvious, perhaps, is the 1923 short story “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.” In this tale, an aging professor attempts to rejuvenate himself for his young bride by taking a drug derived from the langur monkeys of the Himalayas. Of course he does not realize that this concoction will alter both his body and mind, devolving him into a sinister, threatening figure. The flavor of the tale invites comparisons with other classic science fiction works such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896).
Arguably an even better example from the Holmes canon is 1910’s “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.” Holmes hypothesizes that the victims went mad and/or died from inhaling the powdered root of an African plant that, once heated, vaporizes and carries on the air. He tests the hypothesis on himself—so successfully that Watson must save him, in what is one of the duo’s most harrowing moments. Conan Doyle created the fictional plant at the heart of the mystery, but he presents it as plausible fact, going so far as to offer its scientific name (radix pedis diabolic, or “devil’s-foot root” in Latin) for the sake of realism. Holmes builds and tests his theory of the crime like a proper scientist. As the genre legend Isaac Asimov admits in his introduction to Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, “The Devil’s Foot” is not merely a compelling mystery, it is also “very good science fiction.”
Since the Sherlock Holmes canon as a whole displays a science fiction sensibility, and some Holmes stories in particular are clearly works of science fiction, it is unsurprising that science fiction authors who came after Conan Doyle have chosen to use Sherlock Holmes in their own genre writings.
Sherlock Holmes in Science Fiction Literature
During his lifetime, Conan Doyle opened Sherlock Holmes’s universe to other creative minds. In an often-quoted telegram to U.S. actor and playwright William Gillette, he said this of his most famous character: “You may marry him or murder him or do whatever you like with him.” Friends such as J.M. Barrie (of Peter Pan fame) wrote Holmesian stories for Conan Doyle’s amusement. In the decades following Conan Doyle’s death, the Holmes pastiche has become a popular phenomenon of its own. Within this tradition, a number of subgenres have developed, from Sherlock Holmes-meets-Jack the Ripper tales to romance stories in which Holmes finds true love.
One of the more popular of these subgenres often walks the borderline of science fiction. Stories in which Holmes encounters vampires may lean toward fantasy or science fiction, depending on how the vampirism itself is explained. What is certain is that some of those who have contributed to this Holmes-vampire subgenre are writers who have made their professional names in science fiction. For example, Fred Saberhagen, most famous among science fiction readers for his Berserker saga, also penned a series about Dracula comprised of ten novels and two short stories; The Holmes-Dracula File (1978) and Séance for a Vampire (1994), in particular, are noteworthy as Holmes pastiches. Best known for his Chronicles of Amber novels, Robert Zelazny combined Sherlock Holmes with Count Dracula and a host of other Victorian heroes and villains for A Night in the Lonesome October (1993), which was nominated for science fiction’s prestigious Nebula Award.
A host of other writers have devised strategies for drawing Holmes into works that are undeniably science fiction. These may be divided into three loose categories: tales that fold Holmes into preexisting science fiction stories; tales that pair Holmes with various science fiction-related individuals, either fictional or historical; and tales that allow Holmes to travel in time or have other science fictional adventures. Discussing all such publications thoroughly would require a book-length study, but a few representative works may illustrate each of these approaches.
Pairing Holmes with Science Fiction-Related Characters Including Holmes in Preexisting Science Fiction Stories
One trend in Holmes pastiches is that of retelling a well-known science fiction story, or offering a sequel to one, and including Holmes as a central character. For instance, the father-son writing team of Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman published Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds in 1975. This novel—a collection of several short stories, more accurately, beginning with “The Adventure of the Martian Client,” which first appeared in The Magazine Of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1969—serves as a sequel to H.G. Wells’s 1898 science fiction classic The War of the Worlds. It follows Holmes and Watson (as well as Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger) as they experience the Martian invasion of London. Titan Books released a new version in 2009 as The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The War of the Worlds.
Loren Estleman provides another example with his 1969 novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes, which details how Holmes, at the Queen’s request, investigates the murder of Sir Danvers Carew. Holmes thus is drawn into the world of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 science fiction novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. (This, too, was rereleased by Titan Books in 2011.) The formula continues to be popular; Guy Adams’s 2012 work Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Doctor Moreau builds upon The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells (1896), enabling Holmes and Watson to discover the chilling experiments conducted by Wells’s brilliant-but-mad physiologist.
Pairing Holmes with Science Fiction-Related Characters
A second kind of story pairs Holmes with characters, either historical or literary, who are associated with traditional science fiction. Take, for example, The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls (2008) by John R. King. This novel picks up where Conan Doyle’s Holmes story “The Final Problem” ends, at the bottom of Reichenbach Falls, adding a new element: Thomas Carnacki. Carnacki, known as the “Ghost Finder,” starred in multiple short stories by William Hope Hodgson from 1910-1948. One of science fiction’s earliest “paranormal investigators,” Carnacki utilized both contemporary technology (such as photography) and imaginary technology (such as his beloved “electric pentacle”) when on a case. King employs Carnacki to save Holmes and then team up with the Great Detective against Professor Moriarty in an adventure with decidedly supernatural overtones.
Similarly, Barbara Roden pairs Holmes with another classic genre character in her short story “The Things That Shall Come Upon Them” (first published in Gaslight Grimoire in 2008). Created by Hesketh V. Hesketh-Prichard (a friend of Conan Doyle’s) and his mother Kate, writing as E. and H. Heron, Flaxman Low was science fiction’s first “psychic detective.” Stories featuring Low appeared in Pearson’s Magazine and, in 1899, were published together in the collection The Experiences of Flaxman Low. In her tale, Roden contrasts Holmes’s and Low’s quite different approaches to solving mysteries when she assigns both detectives the task of investigating the home of Julian Karswell from M.R. James’s “Casting the Runes” (1911).
This approach also remains popular. In 2012, Howard Hopkins edited Sherlock Holmes: The Crossovers Casebook, offering stories that pair Holmes with a number of historical and literary characters, including Conan Doyle’s own science fiction star, Professor Challenger.
Allowing Holmes to Do Science Fictional Things
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