Isaac Asimov and the character of Sherlock Holmes

 Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space was published in 1985 and I’m pretty sure my brother found it around that time and introduced it to me. It is an anthology of Sherlock Holmes science fiction stories and it was edited by Isaac Asimov, as well as Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh. Of course, Isaac Asimov’s name is the one that is the biggest on the cover.

From what I can tell, this is one of the earliest examples of a fantastical collection of Sherlock Holmes fiction. Lord knows, you won’t have a problem finding a whole bunch of them now.

I decided to go back and reread the book for the first time in my adult life. And it was not the experience I was expecting. Yes, I couldn’t remember reading some of the stories whatsoever. Yes, some of them weren’t as good as I remembered. But they were still pretty decent on a whole.

But here was the surprise. All of the stories in the book were reprints and, reading the book with more awareness, I realized how much the book tapped into other series. In fact, the book had introduced me to a number of different authors.

When I first read it, I fully realized that the book included a story from Paul Anderson and Gordon Dickson’s Hoka series and Assimov’s own Black Widowers. I’ve gone on to read both of those series. I honestly find the Hoka series pretty one note but the Black Widowers are a lot of fun.

However, I had forgotten there is a story from Fred Saberhagen’s Beserker series, which would have been the first time I would have read anything from that series. I learned that there was a story from the Brigadier Ffellowes series. (Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space is the only place I remember ever heard of that series so I have no idea if it’s any good)

What I found most fascinating is that the book contains two of Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton stories. Which are, in many ways, Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen thirty years older. Including the first of Farmer’s two Ralph Von Wau Wau stories. (Spider Robinson would go onto use the character more often and, frankly, better to the point that I feel he’s now really a Robinson character.) 

Really, the Wold Newton family setting actually serves as a model for the anthology as a whole. Because so many of the stories aren’t Sherlock Holmes stories as much as they are meta commentary about Sherlock Holmes. Which makes the book honestly far more interesting than if it was just Sherlock Holmes in Outer Space.

Taken as pieces, Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space is an amusing series of yarns. Taken as a whole, it’s an interesting exploration of the character.

Sherlock Holmes is for every setting

I divide post-Doyle Sherlock Holmes into two categories. True pastiches... and everything else :P

 

Is the story set in late nineteenth century and has Watson and Holmes dealing with natural events and people? Then it is probably a straight pastiche. Are there elves or robots or aliens? Then it falls under everything else :D

To be fair, the line is a fairly unclear one. The Adventure of the Creeping Man from the original cannon kind of crosses the line. The Basil Rathbone movies I’ve watched seemed to be set later but are otherwise not fantastical. On the other hand, the Downey Junior ones are in the right time but have some fantastic elements. But too fantastic?

Okay. True confession time. I prefer the more fantastic stories. One of my first real introductions to Sherlock Holmes, before I had more more than a couple of the original stories, was Sherlock Holmes Through a Time and Space, edited by Isaac Asimov. 

Beyond the fact that I happen to love fantasy and science fiction, I think more fantastic pastiches are a little more forgiving. If Sherlock Holmes is a robot or a alien teddy bear or investigating a were-automobile (yes, all examples from the collection :D), you’re not expecting the stories to read like they were written by Arthur Conan Doyle.

That said, I have come to really enjoy well written legitimate pastiches. I partially blame August Derleth and his Solar Pons. Openly written out of a love for Sherlock Holmes, they aren’t perfect but they are a lot of fun and made me appreciate Derleth a lot more than I had before.

One book I stumbled upon and rather enjoyed that I have to comment on is Conned Again, Watson. It’s actually a series of math lessons but written as Sherlock Holmes stories. I found it entertaining and educational. Not brilliant and not for a serious student of math but it stuck with me!

Sherlock Holmes is at home everywhere.

Can’t get enough Cthulhu and Holmes

My two favorite forms of pastiches are Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu Mythos. Both are public domain so plenty of folks try their hand at either creating new Sherlock Holmes stories, sometimes with fanatic elements and sometimes just ‘lost’ stories, or opening up the can of worms that was Lovecraft’s cosmic horror. And while there is some complete garbage out there, a surprisingly amount is fun reading or even actually good.

Part of the reason why I think both subjects work so well as pastiches is because there’s a lot of room to work with. Which is obvious with the Cthulhu mythos. Compare The Strange High House in the Mist with At the Mountains of Madness. Just in Lovecraft alone, there was a wide spectrum of stories and tones. Even in his own life, his circle of friends like Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E Howard worked with elements of his ideas.

It seems a little stranger with Sherlock Holmes can inspire such a wide variety of work that, well, isn’t a train wreck. I mean, the character inspired a genre but all the stories are about two guys, Holmes and Watson. That’s a lot more limited.

I think the secret to Sherlock Holmes being open such a wide variety of interpretations and still being ‘true’ and entertaining is that the character in the original stories is pretty flat and distant. Which isn’t a dig because the original stories were driven by plot and some really good plots at that.

In comparison, Hercule Poirot has a much more defined personality and would be much harder to write about good pastiches about. Holmes is enough of a cypher that Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch all play very different Holmes that all still work.

The author who straddled both pastiches was, of course, August Derleth. While I appreciate that he kept Lovecraft in print enough to become a part of culture, he really didn’t capture the cosmic despair of Lovecraft. On the other hand, his Solar Pons stories, openly pastiches of Holmes, are a lot of fun and frankly much better written.

These pastiches are almost a guilty pleasure for me except that I don’t think there’s anything to feel guilty about.