Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #10. Arthur Conan Doyle

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СКАЧАТЬ telepathic vampirism, The Parasite, followed. In 1910, well into the phenomenal success of his Sherlock Holmes works, Conan Doyle published “The Terror of Blue John Gap,” a short story about a monstrous creature who lives underground. Two years after the release of the final Sherlock Holmes stories came The Maracot Deep (1929), Conan Doyle’s novel of the discovery of Atlantis by a deep-sea scientific expedition. This list is hardly exhaustive. Over the decades Conan Doyle also produced a number of other stories that could be considered to have science fiction elements, as well.

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      Perhaps his greatest achievement in the genre remains his works centered on the scientific jack-of-all-trades known as Professor Challenger. Just as Conan Doyle drew on his own real-life mentor Joseph Bell to create Sherlock Holmes, he modeled George Edward Challenger on another figure he knew from the University of Edinburgh: Professor of Physiology William Rutherford. Between 1912 and 1929, Conan Doyle published three novels (The Lost World, The Poison Belt, and The Land of Mist) and two short stories (“When the World Screamed” and “The Disintegration Machine”) in the series, pitting the larger-than-life Challenger against such forces as dinosaurs surviving on a remote plateau in South America, a poisonous band of ether fated to intercept the Earth, and a brilliant technological invention with the potential to become a most dangerous weapon. The Challenger stories remain popular—and the inspiration for various pastiches—today.

      Sherlock Holmes and the Science Fiction Sensibility

      Given Conan Doyle’s relationship to the genre, it should come as little surprise that the four novels and fifty-six short stories that comprise his Sherlock Holmes canon are infused with a “science fiction sensibility.” Consider, for example, how John Watson initially hears of Sherlock Holmes from Stamford in the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet. Stamford describes Holmes as “a little too scientific for my tastes—it approaches to cold-bloodedness.” Stamford goes on to characterize the man as the sort who might, “out of a spirit of inquiry,” use his friend—or, for that matter, himself—as a test subject for experimentation, due to his “passion for definite and exact knowledge.”

      When Watson first encounters Holmes in person, in the chemical laboratory of St. Bart’s Hospital, he describes the scene in this way:

      Broad, low tables were scattered about, which bristled with retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps, with their blue flickering flames. There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure. “I’ve found it! I’ve found it,” he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand. “I have found a reagent which is precipitated by hæomoglobin, and by nothing else.” Had he discovered a gold mine, greater delight could not have shone upon his features.

      In short, the reader’s introductions to Holmes represent him with the single-minded zeal of a scientist in the familiar setting of a scientist. He is portrayed as a cerebral hero, one whose goal is not to conquer a land, win a girl, or defeat a villain, but rather to know. And, as the reader discovers along with Watson, Holmes employs his own disciplined method with exact precision in order to achieve this goal. His drive to understand, to solve the mysteries of the universe through methodical rationality, reveals Holmes as a distinctly science fictional protagonist.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ