Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #10. Arthur Conan Doyle

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      Other authors give Holmes science fiction-related adventures. For instance, David Dvorkin in Time for Sherlock Holmes (1983) posits a Holmes who has discovered the secret to immortality thanks to his bees and a Moriarty who has stolen H.G. Wells’s time machine. As Moriarty travels into the future to assassinate world leaders and create chaos, the deathless Holmes (along with equally immortal John Watson and Mycroft Holmes) is there to meet him. Their conflict extends not only into future centuries, but into space itself as humankind explores the universe and colonizes the planets.

      Nebula and Hugo Award winner Vonda N. McIntyre offers a more Earth-bound tale in her short story “The Adventure of the Field Theorems” (first published in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit in 1995). In fact, this narrative hits very close to home, as it has Arthur Conan Doyle himself consider the mystery of crop circles along with Holmes and Watson. Scientist Stephanie Osborn brings Holmes into the present day through her ongoing “Displaced Detective” series (including The Arrival and At Speed in 2011 and The Rendlesham Incident in 2012). In these novels, a modern-day female physicist discovers the alternate reality in which Holmes is doomed to die at Reichenbach Falls, rescues the detective, and brings him into our universe to share her high-tech adventures.

      Several collections of Holmesian science fiction showcase how noted genre authors use Holmes in their works. Among the best of these are Sherlock Holmes through Time and Space (1984), edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin Greenberg, and Charles Waugh; Sherlock in Orbit (1995), edited by Mike Resnick and Martin Greenberg; and The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2009), edited by John Joseph Adams.

      Sherlock Holmes in the World(s) of H.P. Lovecraft

      Writers and readers of Holmesian science fiction seem to agree that the Great Detective appears especially at home in the universe of one author in particular: H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraftian Holmes pastiches—or is that Holmesian Lovecraft pastiches?—form an impressive literary presence of their own.

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      Why H.P. Lovecraft?

      H.P. Lovecraft was a U.S. author of so-called “weird fiction” whose writings are recognized today as formative works in the development of contemporary science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He is perhaps best remembered as the father of the “Cthulhu Mythos,” a shared universe of stories to which many writers contributed, inspired by the premise of Lovecraft’s 1928 story “The Call of Cthulhu” and his related writings. “The Call of Cthulhu” suggests that alien creatures once ruled the Earth and in the future will awaken from their current slumber to reclaim their dominion. The insignificance of humanity on this indifferent cosmic stage threatens the sanity and lives of those people who are sensitive enough to perceive it.

      At first blush, the otherworldliness of Lovecraft’s vision might not seem a fitting subject for Holmes’s skeptical attention. As Holmes himself says in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” (1924), “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us.” No Great Old Ones from outer space, one might say, need apply.

      There are, however, excellent reasons why so many authors have felt compelled to invite Holmes into Lovecraft’s world(s). For one thing, the setting fits. Conan Doyle and Lovecraft were contemporaries; Lovecraft outlived Conan Doyle only by seven years. Lovecraft was an enthusiastic Anglophile, as well, and fancied himself a Victorian gentleman by nature, if not in circumstance. Thus Lovecraft’s writings reflect a certain flavor, a mood created by gaslight and shadows and veiled peril, that complements the tone of the Holmes canon well.

      The message of both the Holmes stories and Lovecraft’s work also agrees in principle: the universe is knowable. Conan Doyle’s Holmes reaches his conclusions via the science of deduction. Lovecraft likewise constructed the body of his tales on the skeleton of the hard sciences. A serious study of astronomy, in particular, informed his mechanistic materialist views and led to the cosmic outlook of his fiction. The two authors drew different lessons from the comprehensibility of the world around them, however. The universe is knowable, Conan Doyle seems to tell readers, and is that not reassuring? We may find order in the apparent confusion. On the other hand, Lovecraft implies that the universe is knowable… but understanding it might drive one mad. (It bears repeating that Lovecraft’s protagonists are often sensitive, thoughtful, curious scholars and researchers and investigators, СКАЧАТЬ