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, all of whom suffer from the desire to know—not unlike Sherlock Holmes himself.)
Many readers see the appeal in bringing Conan Doyle’s and Lovecraft’s conclusions to bear on one another. In other words, blending their universes offers the chance to “shake up” the unflappable Sherlock Holmes at last, and/or the opportunity to bring a calming reason to Lovecraft’s bleak and terrifying nightmares. Furthermore, as Lovecraft’s stories are far more popular today than they were during his lifetime, especially within science fiction circles, writers who wish to write a Holmesian story feel comfortable in invoking Lovecraft’s mythos, knowing they are safe in assuming some knowledge and familiarity on the part of readers.
Exemplar Works
One example of a key Holmesian-Lovecraftian work is P.H. Cannon’s Pulptime: Being a Singular Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Kalem Club, as if narrated by Frank Belknap Long, Jr (1984). This mystery involves Lovecraft himself as a character, as well as his writer friends who formed the “Kalem Club” (including award-winning author Frank Belknap Long), and Harry Houdini. Added to this blending of historical figures is the Great Detective himself: elderly, but insta
ntly recognizable.
2003’s Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror!, edited by Michael Reeves and John Pelan, draws attention to this phenomenon by collecting some of the most compelling short stories that place Holmes in Lovecraft’s universe. Science fiction and detective fiction author Barbara Hambly in “The Adventure of the Antiquarian’s Niece,” for instance, pairs Holmes and Watson with Carnacki the Ghost Finder to traverse the landscape of several of Lovecraft’s stories, most notably “The Dunwich Horror” (1929) and “The Rats in the Walls” (1924).
Perhaps the single most famous Holmes-Lovecraft mashup also appears in Shadows Over Baker Street; it is Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald,” which won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the Locus Award for Best Novelette, both science fiction honors. This piece relocates Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” to the darker world of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu tales.
The formula continues to yield new works. Christian Klaver’s The Adventure of the Innsmouth Whaler (2010), for example, puts Holmes and Watson on a case directly related to Lovecraft’s story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1931). It is not uncommon to see Lovecraft-inspired works in the pages of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine; the two lead stories in the June 2012 issue of The Lovecraft eZine are Sherlock Holmes stories.
The pairing even has leapt beyond fiction. The adventure game Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, developed by Frogwares for Microsoft Windows in 2006, follows Holmes and Watson as they investigate mysterious disappearances linked to the Cthulhu universe. After drawing a worldwide audience (and winning GameSpot’s “Best Use of a License” Award in 2007), a remastered version appeared in 2008. It earned not only popularity, but a rating of M (Mature 17+)—the first Holmes-related game to do so.
Sherlock Holmes and Other Science Fiction Media
Sherlock Holmes has made himself as comfortable in other forms of science fiction media as he has in novels and short stories. A thorough review of his appearances demands a separate study, but a quick overview proves the point.
Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who
The world’s longest-running science fiction television series, the BBC’s Doctor Who (1963-present), has spawned several tie-in publications that feature Holmes. Andy Lane’s novel All-Consuming Fire (1994) teams Holmes and Watson with the Seventh Doctor against Azathoth (one of the figures from Lovecraft’s mythos). Two years later, in Paul Cornell’s novel Happy Endings, Holmes and Watson are brought forward in time to attend the wedding of the Seventh Doctor’s companion, Bernice “Benny” Summerfield, to Jason Kane. One of the novels in the Faction Paradox series, itself a spin-off to Doctor Who, is Kelly Hale’s 1994 Erasing Sherlock, in which a doctoral candidate goes back in time, posing as a housemaid in 221B Baker Street in order to study the young consulting detective.
Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek
Holmes’s presence in “the final frontier” is, thanks to Nicholas Meyer, Star Trek canon. Holmes fans know Meyer first and foremost as the author of three pastiche novels, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974, which was adapted to film in 1976, with Meyer’s screenplay), The West End Horror (1976), and The Canary Trainer (1993). Star Trek audiences know him an uncredited co-writer for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), a credited co-writer for Star Trek IV: The Journey Home (1986), and the co-writer and director of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991).
The parallels between the rational Holmes and Star Trek’s logical science officer, Mr. Spock, became a running theme in Star Trek fan discussions and fan works almost from the first appearance of Trek on U.S. television in 1966. The fact that actor Leonard Nimoy, who brought Spock to life, also portrayed Sherlock Holmes in the documentary short Sherlock Holmes: Interior Motive (1975), and again in the 1975-1976 Royal Shakespeare Company’s U.S. production of William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes, invited further comparisons. As Nicholas Meyer told Ryan Britt (as cited in “Sherlock Holmes and the Science Fiction of Deduction”), “The link between Spock and Holmes was obvious to everyone. I just sort of made it official.”
Meyer made it official in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. During a scene in which Spock puts forth his own deductions, he quotes directly from Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” (1892) and credits Holmes as a forefather: “As an ancestor of mine once said, ‘Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”
Star Trek: The Next Generation paid homage to both Holmes and the Holmes-Spock (and, by implication, Spock-Data) by having the android Data develop a taste for Holmesian roleplaying. Complete with deerstalker and pipe, Data faces off against a holographic version of Professor Moriarty in the episodes “Elementary, My Dear Data” (1988) and “Ship in a Bottle” (1993).
Sherlock Holmes and Other Television
Holmes has starred in other science fiction television fare, as well. For example, the made-for-television CBS movie The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987) features Watson’s present-day descendant Jane discovering a cryogenically frozen Holmes and reviving him. Perhaps the best example of the science fictional “updating” of the Holmes canon stories is the 1999-2001 animated series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, a co–production by DiC and Scottish Television. Each episode revisits classic adventures, with a twist: the year is 2104. Sherlock Holmes, frozen for years, has thawed and returned to his detective work, joined by a robotic Watson and a descendant of Inspector Lestrade. Professor Moriarty is represented in this future by one of his clones.
The BBC’s Sherlock
The most faithful and sophisticated reimagining of Holmes at present, and arguably one of the best adaptations of the Holmes canon at any time, the BBC’s Sherlock (2010-present) displays a keen science fiction sensibility. This is to be expected, considering that co-creator Steven Moffat is also the head writer and executive producer of Doctor Who, and co-creator Mark Gatiss has written for and guest starred in Doctor Who, adapted for television and starred in H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (2010), and performed in the live television remake of the science fiction classic The Quatermass Experiment (2005), among other genre-related accomplishments.
Although the series has displayed many science fictional characteristics since its debut (thoroughly exploring and exploiting contemporary technology, from blogs to mobile phones to government surveillance equipment), the second-series episodes “The Hounds of Baskerville” and “The Reichenbach Fall” (2012) qualify as science fiction proper. The former updates the Gothic fear of a spectral hound, recasting it in terms of conspiracy theories surrounding genetic experimentation at the Baskerville military research base to create a “luminous” super attack dog. Sherlock, John, and Lestrade uncover a conspiracy regarding “H.O.U.N.D.,” a secret government project designed to create a chemical weapon that triggers violent hallucinations in those exposed to it. The latter episode finds Jim Moriarty with a computer code capable of overriding any and all security systems, which he demonstrates by simultaneously opening the vault at the Bank of England, unlocking the cells at Pentonville Prison, and breaking into the display case containing the Crown Jewels.
The third series of the program, currently scheduled for filming in 2013, likely will continue to illustrate the affinity between the Holmes canon and science fiction.
Sherlock and Science Fiction
In Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902), Sherlock Holmes notes, “We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.” This is an elegant description of what Conan Doyle did, and what creators today continue to do, with Holmes. It is also an excellent characterization of the endeavor of science fiction itself: “the scientific use of the imagination.” As today’s world continues to blur the lines between science fiction and science fact, the Great Detective will remain as relevant and meaningful as ever, incorporated into the genre, figuratively and sometimes literally immortal.
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Amy H.
Sturgis earned her Ph.D. in intellectual history from Vanderbilt University and is scholar of science fiction/fantasy studies and Native American studies, the author of four books and editor of six others. Her official website is amyhsturgis.com. This essay is based on a live lecture presented in February 2012 and sponsored by the Hugo Award-winning podcast StarShipSofa.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DOCKLANDS APPARITION, by Mark Wardecker
When trying to select which of my friend Sherlock Holmes’s cases to lay before the public, I have often had to take consistency into account. For it was not unusual, given the many puzzles and problems with which he was presented, that a client’s story might seem to contain those elements of the unique and even grotesque that Holmes found so gratifying, only for the case to later evaporate into the banal and the commonplace. Often, the most absorbing investigations began humbly, with a detail that seemed just slightly awry, such as a discarded photograph of a lady found lying upon the ground. And not since our encounter with the notorious Irene Adler had a photograph of a beautiful woman posed such a threat to a nation’s stability as the one in the case I am about to relate.
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It was on a gloomy, rainy day in the spring of 1896, just after Holmes and I had finished lunch, when Mrs Hudson entered our sitting room to announce Mr August Pierpont, a tall and sturdy man with greying sideburns and mustache.
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