Sherlock Holmes and Science Fiction

It seems almost natural today for Sherlock Holmes to be linked to science fiction. Holmes is such a real character, yet somehow he is real in any sort of iteration. There are many, many adaptations of books that I have merely to glance at, and my reaction is instantly: “No. Oh…no. That is no so-and-so.” I am hard to please with my adaptations.

Yet, as I said, Holmes seems to be an exception. (Watson? Not so much….) I have seen probably a dozen or more actors or various “incarnations” of the character, from Basil Rathbone to Benedict Cumberbatch, The Great Mouse Detective to Sherlock Gnomes. Of course, some portrayals are better than others. Most interpretations of the character emphasize certain Holmesian characteristics unevenly; for instance, in the movies with Robert Downey, Jr., they highlight Holmes’ pugilistic talents (I remember hearing people complain, “Sherlock Holmes doesn’t fight!”).

The fact remains that Holmes isn’t not most of these interpretations. He’s a combination of all of them.

Unnerving Short Stories by Rudyard Kipling

I have known for a long time that there are two basic views of Rudyard Kipling:

1.      Rudyard Kipling the author of The Jungle Book and Just So Stories…thus, a children’s author.

2.      Rudyard Kipling, author of The White Man’s Burden…thus, a racist.

The Kipling I met when reading the collection Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror & Fantasy (edited by Stephen Jones) was bits of both, yet neither.

While I prefer novels where I can really settle into a world and get to know the people that live there, I have recently begun to appreciate one aspect of short stories: collections of one author can showcase the broad spectrum of their talents, and thus reveal more of themselves.

Reviewing "The Swoop!" by P.G. Wodehouse

“It will be news to the Man in the Street to learn that, with the possible exception of the Black Hand, the Scouts are perhaps the most carefully-organised secret society in the world.”

The Swoop is one of the few PG Wodehouse stories that does not involve:

     a) A love-stricken chap

     b) A beautiful girl

     c) An overbearing aunt

     d) Theft or attempted theft at a stereotypical country house

In fact, it is very unlike most PG Wodehouse books I’ve read, in that it doesn’t include a lot of the twists and turns and mistaken identities and broken engagements and other convoluted situations from which Jeeves is ever extricating Bertie Wooster.

Instead, this story is about Clarence Chugwater and his fellow Boy Scouts as they oust an invasion on England from…well, everyone. Despite being different from the other books I’ve read by Wodehouse, there are still the hijinks, the lightning-quick wordplay, and the over-the-top characters.

The horror, the horror!

"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there--there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend."

- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

It’s easier to tear down than to build up, and so it’s easier to criticize someone else’s writing than it is to actually write something better. There it is, in black and white, an author’s hours upon hours of work, sweat, and tears. It’s placing their heart and mind on a pedestal for others to swing a stick at for any minor malfeasance.

This is why I normally try to talk about books I recommend. I’ll point out flaws, but an honest review is better than hyping up something only to disappoint you when you read it. I read a vast amount of books I don’t end up reviewing at all because it would be merely me with a stick in my hand. Life is too short to waste it on reading books you don’t love, and my life is too short to waste it on blogging about those books.

This entry is an exception, because another thing I like to do is go over classic literature with new eyes. Classics are hard to do this with, because most of us—even those who haven’t read them—have an idea how we should feel about a book from what teachers or other sources have implied. One of the most “preconceived” pieces of literature I encountered in my education and critical readings was Heart of Darkness.

Little Old Ladies 3: Bertie Wooster’s Aunts

Much as I love Bertie Wooster, especially played by Hugh Laurie where he’s not quite so much of an upper-class twit as most illustrators make him, I can’t help but feel that he deserves all the trouble he gets for being such a doormat. It’s not that he’s a doormat to one person that knows his kryptonite and manipulates his weaknesses. It’s that he caves to every person he knows. This includes fellow Drones club members, old Eton classmates, cousins, girlfriends and fiancées, former girlfriends and fiancées, enemies, bullies, constables, and most especially his aunts. Of course his butler Jeeves also exerts a fair amount of influence on Bertie, but usually this is of a positive note, such as making him shave off terrible mustachios, and it is implied Jeeves would like Bertie to go to fewer parties and read more Spinoza. 

For someone who is particularly susceptible to the threats and manipulations of aunts, Bertie is flooded with more than his fair share. Of the ones that are mentioned (and I am led to believe there might be other unnamed aunts off skulking in the wings) there are Emily, Julia, Agatha and Dahlia. Emily and Julia are aunts by marriage, and not so much problems in their own right, except their children often are off getting into trouble which of course Bertie (rather than the actual parents) is responsible for getting them out of. To be fair, this may be less about aunts Julia and Emily feeling up to the task of reprimanding their children, and more about Bertie’s having a certain butler who has a knack for solving sticky issues.

Deceitful above All Things: Condemnation of Human Nature in “Young Goodman Brown” and "The Mysterious Stranger"

The works of both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain critique the moral conventions of not only historical societies, but that of their contemporaries. Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” and Twain’s unfinished novella “The Mysterious Stranger,” for example, make grim judgments on innate characteristics of human nature. Although their individual aspects differ, both works demonstrate humanity as naturally depraved, hereditarily corrupted, and without any hope of breaking this futile cycle of sin and hypocrisy. Despite the differences between the works, therefore, they communicate a common message about the status of human “civilization” throughout history. 

In “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Mysterious Stranger,” an ignorant young human comes into contact with a devil-figure and experience supernatural incidents. The protagonists are naïve in their preconceptions of humanity’s moral and social uprightness, while the devil-figures show the protagonists the diabolic character traits in human nature. Through interactions with these supernatural entities, both Hawthorne and Twain illustrate how humanity is so corrupt, even the devil himself “in his own shape is less hideous, than when he rages in the breast of man.”

Thoughts on Stephen Crane’s "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets"

Maggie Johnson is born into poverty and degradation, a life without hope of escape from her circumstances, and without the education or resources to do anything to better her life. It is her innate desire for a better life that drives the rest of the story. Maggie attempts to elevate her lifestyle through a relationship with Pete, a man whom she believes will help her break away from her present circumstances, but in doing so she brings about her downfall.

Written in the gossiping tone of a bystander, Crane reports life in the slums, where people are hardened until their humanity is almost unrecognizable. These people are trapped by the world they were born into and slowly assimilated into the culture so as to obstruct them from any escape. After the story’s tragic ending, Crane makes no editorial comments, preaches no possible solutions. He doesn’t have to, because if there is any remaining empathy within Crane’s readers, the story’s message speaks for itself.

Long Reviews of Short Stories: Charles Yu's "Third Class Superhero"

With names like "401(k)" and "32.05864991%" and “Two-Player Infinitely Iterated Simultaneous Semi-cooperative Game with Spite and Reputation Autobiographical Raw Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction,” it is a fair guess in just perusing the table of contents of this short story collection that is both quirky and probably written by a former science major or something. And both inferences are accurate.

Though I’m not much of a short story fan, I was drawn to this colorful paperback’s cover and science-fiction-y title. I was not disappointed with the content. Short stories have a tendency for being minimalist, a bit ambiguous, and existential. Again, I was not disappointed. Some stories, like “Realism” are so bleak as to almost feel like a cliché of Bleakness. What Yu does differently with his writing than most other contemporary storytellers is incorporating technobabble almost seamlessly into his world-building.    

Play-By-Play Reactions: A Review of Haruki Murakami's "The Strange Library"

An unnamed, unaged, undescribed boy character goes to a library in his new shoes to return his books. He has to be home by 6:00 or else his mother will worry; not long ago he was attacked by a Big Black Dog and ever since then he has never been the same and his mother has always expected him to get home in a timely fashion. The librarian at the checkout counter is a stranger to him.  Checking in the returned items, she asks if there is anything else. The boy says yes, he’d like some books.

Me: Really?  Well from now on, unnamed boy of indeterminate age, I shall refer to you in my blog as Captain Obvious.

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Some Short Story Reviews

I don’t often review short stories, and that’s mostly because I don’t often read short stories.  Especially during this time of year where I live, the days are short and dreary and windy, making for great atmosphere to read a long novel by Elizabeth Gaskell or one of the Bronte sisters. But just as sometimes one hankers for a feast, and other times is just a pit peckish for a small snack, sometimes it’s just the right time for short stories. I’ve had my fill of Araby, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Awakening from my college years—though oddly enough I didn’t get any Kafka or Dostoyevsky assignments, which is a conundrum and a shame in my opinion. But when it comes to picking out contemporary fiction—short stories and novellas in particular—I look for less depressing fare, mostly quirky, magic-realism or almost science-fictional genres.

Reviewing Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger"

“It was 1590—winter.  Austria was far away from the world, and asleep; it was still the Middle Ages in Austria, and promised to remain so forever.”

~Opening lines of The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain

Theodor and his two friends, Nikolaus and Seppi, live in a small village in Medieval Austria.   One day they meet a mysterious stranger, a youth named Satan. This Stranger makes comments that lead one to suspect he is an angel—or something like an angel, as he admits he was named after his “uncle” the Devil—and he has special powers over the forces of nature, such as generating fire or constructing tiny people. 

Thoughts on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse"

This story is a lot like The Tell-Tale Heart in that the murderer’s own neurotic obsession with hiding his guilt only makes it more ostensible. Of course The Imp of the Perverse includes a lot more contemplation on the psychological impulse to do wrong “merely because we feel that we should not.”

Now, I’ve never considered murder just because I now I shouldn’t, but the psychological theory has some validity on a smaller scale. Junk food, for instance, is all the more irresistible the harder one tries to resist it. It’s like a Chinese finger torture of the mind.

Perhaps Poe, being in a more Biblically-literate society, wrote The Imp of the Perverse with Romans 7:15-20 in mind:

"For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.  For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me."

(English Standard Version)

Certainly this similarity would not have been lost on the 19^th century readership, especially since Poe’s audience was primarily comprised of women, who were seen as the moral and religious centers of society.

Reviewing Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

The first time I encountered this story was on the Disney Channel. I was at a sleepover at my grandma’s house, and one of the perks of a sleepover was watching television late into the night. Unfortunately nothing of much interest to children is on late into the night, so I got stuck watching The Adventures of Ichabod Crane and Mr. Toad. I still have no inkling why these two were put together—unless it’s because both are a bit too smug for their own good—but boy! Did I get scared of the monster in that cartoon!  I’m talking about Katrina Van Tassel, of course. I was sure that girl was up to no good. Probably a Black Widow or something.