by Ryan Britt
And yet, all of Dave’s suggestions for the opening music for Time Fucker felt wrong, and it was all down to the fact that he had no idea what the music actually connoted. Neither of us knew jack shit about real classical music, but Dave was suggesting things according to how they actually sounded. In every single way, this man was and is a greater lover of music—specifically this kind of music—than I was or ever could be. But liking the theme song to your favorite TV show or movie is something I don’t think most people thought about outside of the context of actually having seen a given show. Not all sci-fi scores were like John Williams’s, where they could stand on their own and tell a story. Some could only be appreciated if you also knew there were ugly beige space suits associated with those notes or, in the case of Supergirl, black goo that actually infects its upbeat music.
Occasionally, I meet people who disprove this rule, like Dave, who actually just loves this style of music, but for the most part, dorky fans connect to and love music for the thing they’re interested in because they’re interested in the thing itself. This isn’t to say theme music is inherently empty or meaningless or without skill. One of the most famous pieces of music—“Chariots of Fire”—was composed by Vangelis for the historical drama of the same name. I can hum this tune right now, and you probably can, too, but do you know what film Vangelis scored after Chariots of Fire? That’s right: it was Blade Runner, the 1982 classic sci-fi movie directed by Ridley “Alien” Scott and starring Harrison Ford. I love the soundtrack to Blade Runner, and I think its ethereal oddity is part of what makes it so great, in the same way John Williams’s music makes Star Wars or Jurassic Park work so well. Vangelis is obviously not a joke, and neither is John Williams, and, further, neither is Murray Gold, who currently scores Doctor Who, or Bear McCreary, who gave us those great drums (and a Jimi Hendrix cover) on the contemporary Battlestar Galactica. There is an inherent art to this kind of thing, and as is evidenced in my friend Dave’s love of nearly every single score ever, it can be appreciated on its own.
Still, when it came to picking the opening music for Time Fucker, I was glad I knew my way around all these old sci-fi theme songs. Because when I selected Barry Gray’s theme for Space: 1999 as our opening Time Fucker fanfare, I knew everyone was going to love it. An often forgotten ’70s show, Space: 1999 is all about what happens to the people living on the moon when the moon gets blown out of orbit and starts flying around through space all on its own. How would you create theme music for a show that had as much outer space stuff as it had bell-bottoms? Easy: you start it off like a regular brass-heavy sci-fi fanfare, and then you kick in a funky porno-beat. I was the only one associated with the production of Time Fucker who knew the names of all the characters on Space: 1999, but at least Time Fucker himself knew the name of the composer.
When I listen to E.T. I still want to fly, while most Star Trek music I’ll put on just makes me feel safe with old childhood stuff. But if I ever happen to listen to the theme to Space: 1999, I weirdly now do only think of my own terribly embarrassing college play, and the time I discovered a bizarro version of myself living in my own hometown.
Baker Streets on Infinite Earths: Sherlock Holmes as the Eternal Sci-Fi Superhero
People born in the ’80s who claim to have been into “cool” music as children are full of it. Those of us who were eight in 1989 might try to affect that we listened to the good stuff of the ’80s (like the Smiths), but the fact is, we all just jammed real hard to Paula Abdul, New Kids on the Block, or the theme songs to TV shows we liked. And when it comes to my knowledge of Victorian literature—specifically Sherlock Holmes—I didn’t “grow up” reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle either, and if I’ve ever said that I did, I was lying. I read the entire canon of Holmes numerous times in my early twenties, but I got into Sherlock Holmes through popular science fiction, specifically the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters.*
In 1989, I must have been still reeling from dinosaur sex acts when I saw the episode of The Real Ghostbusters titled “Elementary, My Dear Winston,” in which this show continued its endless obsession with confusing children about the meanings of certain English words, specifically the word “ghost” and, more aggressively, the word “real.”* Rather than assert Sherlock Holmes was a real person, and have his ghost haunt a present-day cartoon New York, the show decided that the ghosts of Sherlock Holmes and Watson actually sprung into existence because enough people in the world believed in them. This means a fictional character could have a ghost, the same way fairies exist in Peter Pan, through the popularity of hysterical applause. This turned out to be handy for the Ghostbusters, because when the ghost of the evil Professor Moriarty showed up, it gave them something to do.
Hardly the best example of a science fiction tribute to the great detective Sherlock Holmes, this was still my first exposure to him, and from that moment, I totally placed Holmes among the pantheon of other sci-fi heroes, right next to Batman and Mr. Spock. And, when I grew up, I discovered that I wasn’t wrong. Just like the people in that random episode of The Real Ghostbusters, the enduring belief in Sherlock Holmes is just one piece of the mystery surrounding his undeniable connection to and inspiration for science fiction.
Science fiction relationships to Sherlock Holmes might be contemporarily obvious to anyone who is familiar with the Internet’s fixation on moving GIFs of Benedict Cumberbatch’s cheekbones. The brilliant BBC adaptation of the famous detective—Sherlock—is cowritten by Steven Moffat, who (as of this writing) is also the showrunner for that quirky, long-running little-British-science-fiction-show-that-could, Doctor Who. I used to love this fact so much that I had a giant photograph of Cumberbatch and Matt Smith from Doctor Who hugging Steven Moffat as my screen wallpaper on my computer for like six months in 2011. Fans of both shows have been salivating for a science fiction crossover between the Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey and Cumberbatch’s Sherlock since 2010, but connections to Doctor Who’s titular hero and Holmes go back to Doctor Who’s inception in 1963. The Doctor is a renegade Time Lord, while Sherlock Holmes is an amateur consulting detective. Both are heroes who reject the rules of the fields they work in—Holmes works in crime, the Doctor in space-time—and neither has a great deal of respect for social niceties. Plus, unlike Britain’s other pseudo-literary hero, James Bond, neither the Doctor nor Sherlock Holmes is all that interested in getting laid. In the pantheon of superheroes in general, Sherlock Holmes might not be unique in his asexual, low-violence behavior, but he was one of the first, if not the first, archetypes for a geeky, brainy person winning the day in one pop adventure after another. Still, just because Sherlock is brainy and asexual, it doesn’t suddenly grant him the ability to travel in time and space.
The literary, original, brilliant Sherlock found in the pages of Conan Doyle’s fifty-six short stories and four novels is initially presented as an ignoramus when it comes to the one thing you’d probably associate with science fiction: outer space! The “real” Sherlock Holmes doesn’t know jack shit about the astronomical workings of the planets and stars, and in the first Holmes appearance ever (the novel A Study in Scarlet), he accosts Watson on the subject: “What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.” Holmes likens his mind to an attic, one he can only fill with the right kinds of “furniture” necessary for his occupation. Cumberbatch’s incarnation of the detective updated this image for the twenty-first century by saying, “This is my hard drive,” indicating that his “mind palace” has information limitations. But even if Holmes does get an F in astronomy, his connections to science fiction aren’t casual. When you break it down, Holmes’s sci-fi message is in his methods.
From the years 1887 to 1927, Holmes dies and comes back; faces a variety of criminals, schemes, and ghoulish mysteries; and also becomes a nuisance to Inspector Lestrade and the rest of Scotland Yard. But perhaps his most relevant contribution to s
cience fiction is the invention of something Holmes calls “the science of deduction.”
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 works and serves as the basic premise for nearly every single Holmes adventure. Instead of creating a detective who arrives at the answers through intuition or moxie, Doyle asserted a different premise with the Holmes stories—what if the detective discovers the answers scientifically? What kind of adventures might he have? Looked at from this semantic angle, the original canon of Sherlock Holmes is already science fiction, as science is being used fictionally.
Lyndsay Faye—Holmes expert, author of the Holmes pastiche Dust and Shadow, and member of numerous Sherlock Holmes organizations (notably the Baker Street Irregulars and the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes)—explains: “Sherlock Holmes and science fiction have always been tied together because Doyle was writing about the cutting edge of forensic science . . . For example, Holmes is in the very act of perfecting the world’s first infallible blood test when Watson meets him.”
Still, the hard science of old-school Sherlock Holmes doesn’t always stack up against the forensic labs of today, as much as Cumberbatch’s or Jonny Lee Miller’s twenty-first-century Sherlocks might attempt to bring it all up to speed. And that’s because there are occasionally problems in the methodology. According to Zachary Pirtle, program analyst at NASA, “Real science still doesn’t work in the strictly deductive way that Holmes describes; for the best scientific questions, there are no straightforward answers, and a lot of the hard work comes from simply trying to imagine new possibilities.” And yet Holmes is constantly affirming his belief in the improbable, indicating his imagination is among his intellectual tools. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” Holmes—lacking any evidence—conceives the fantastic notion of a body being placed on the roof of a moving train. In the Granada Television adaptation of the same story, after the hypothesis is proven true, Holmes (as portrayed by the late Jeremy Brett) grins broadly and shouts, “Imagination, Watson! Imagination!” So, while Sherlock Holmes is a walking computer full of logic and reason, he also values imagination in the same way a sci-fi writer might. Five-time Hugo Award winner Mike Resnick asserts that Sherlock Holmes appeals to fans and specifically writers of science fiction because Holmes “is cerebral rather than physical. And he has overcome what seems a tendency to be a social maladroit, which latter defines a lot of writers, many of whom chose their profession for that very reason.”
At this point, we have to talk about Star Trek, and specifically Mr. Spock. Spock’s lack of emotions and his ability to get to the bottom of various outer space mysteries certainly make him the Sherlock Holmes of the future, but it wasn’t until the ’60s were over and the Star Trek films got going that the Holmesian connections to Spock became totally clear. Everybody knows the best Star Trek film is 1982’s The Wrath of Khan, which was written and directed by Nicholas Meyer.* But you might not know that Nicholas Meyer is also the author of three excellent Sherlock Holmes pastiches: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, The Canary Trainer, and The West End Horror. A few years ago, I chatted with Meyer extensively about Sherlock Holmes and he said this: “Because the Holmes stories deal with chemistry and scientific stuff, it’s a hop-skip-and-a-jump over to actual science fiction.” And he would know, because he put actual Sherlock Holmes dialogue into Mr. Spock’s mouth in his other Star Trek movie, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. When faced with an intergalactic whodunit, Spock quotes Holmes by saying, “An ancestor of mine maintained that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Meyer claims that “the link between Spock and Holmes was obvious to everyone. I just sort of made it official.” But it’s more than just a link. In his 1991 Star Trek movie, Nicholas Meyer casually has Spock imply that Sherlock Holmes is literally his ancestor, which actually works just fine, since, according to Star Trek lore, Spock is half human on his mother’s side, meaning Sherlock Holmes could actually be his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. And when I needled Meyer to tell me who Spock’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was, he said that it was “of course, Irene Adler.”*
What’s fun about this notion is that it posits the original Star Trek in the same fictional universe as that of Sherlock Holmes, which is a kind of variation on what Sherlock Holmes fans have been doing for almost a century—playing the great “game,” in which everyone pretends Sherlock Holmes is a real person, and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was just Dr. John Watson’s literary agent. This game has been going on since the founding of the Baker Street Irregulars, the oldest Sherlock Holmes fan organization in the world and, in some ways, the original comic con. Since 1934 (and probably before) “game” is seldom mentioned outright, but simply meant to be the default way to explore Sherlockian scholarship.
Nicholas Meyer took this long-running practical joke so far that when he published his first Holmes pastiche, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, in 1976, the dust jacket actually read “by John H. Watson, M.D., edited by Nicholas Meyer.” In 2002, yours truly read this novel after picking it up at a used bookstore and was utterly baffled by the purported authorship. I’d always thought John Watson was a fictional character! What’s this? He’s real?
The Internet in 2002 wasn’t as forthcoming with this information as it is today, and even if you read Leslie Klinger’s excellently edited 2003 edition of The Complete Annotated Sherlock Holmes, the footnotes will be partially surreal if you didn’t happen to catch his brief note at the beginning where he winks to you and references “the gentle fiction” of the game, thus reminding you that all three volumes of these giant books will have “research” strewn throughout that is, in essence, built on a big old game of make-believe. Just as in that Real Ghostbusters episode, everybody loves pretending Sherlock Holmes is alive in some way, shape, or form. Even if he’s living in Star Trek’s future’s past.
Sadly, if you take Star Trek: The Next Generation as being part of the same canon as the classic Star Trek, then Sherlock Holmes goes right back to being a fictional character. In two memorable episodes of The Next Generation, the android (robot) Mr. Data outright impersonates Sherlock Holmes, casually destroying the theory that Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes occupy the same universe and are governed by the same fictional god. This is a bit of a bummer, but if we can think of Star Trek’s flirtations with trying to subsume Sherlock Holmes into its own canon as a thought experiment, an even more compelling and slightly frightening notion emerges: the world can’t exist without Sherlock Holmes. Any conception of a reality without Sherlock Holmes has to be science fiction, specifically. And if that happens in TV, it’s always, paradoxically, on shows featuring Sherlock Holmes.
Take Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Surely, this is a science fiction program, because it takes place in an alternate dimension in which Sherlock Holmes is not a famous literary character and no one in the twenty-first century has heard of him. Ditto for Elementary. What kind of planet Earth is this? Not the twenty-first century I live in. In fact, you could assume that the crime of these alternate twenty-first centuries is far more rampant than the crime in our dimension. Without the heroic inspiration of Sherlock Holmes in the late 1800s—either as fictional character or real person—any dimension on planet Earth is going to suffer from a bleaker future. Nicholas Meyer describes the original Holmes stories as a “secular religion,” because through them “the world can be understood.” And while I personally agree with him, it doesn’t actually matter what Nicholas Meyer and I think, because the proof is in the zeitgeist itself. Even when you’ve got a hospital TV show like House, some sort of faux Sherlock Holmes saunters in. He’s everywhere! Sherlock Holmes is, bizarrely, stuck in our cultural programming so hard that it makes you wonder if some kind of divine scientific creator didn’t put him there. If Cumb
erbatch’s Sherlock were to die, he’d immediately come back to life. Oh wait. That already happened. Even Conan Doyle tried to kill off Holmes in the original story “The Final Problem,” and the universe just didn’t allow for it.* It could be magic keeping Holmes alive, or it could be science fiction.
Over the years, science fiction authors have delighted in figuring out ways for Holmes to remain more literally immortal. In Susan Casper’s “Holmes Ex Machina,” the detective is reconstructed as a holographic computer program and assists in solving a minor mystery relating to missing film canisters. In “Moriarty by Modem” by Jack Nimersheim, another complex computer program is created to emulate the thought patterns and theories of Sherlock Holmes, but sadly a parallel computer virus called “Moriarty” is also accidentally created and loosed upon a cute 1990s version of cyberspace that sort of sounds a little like Tron minus Jeff Bridges (and thus, minus the charm).
Further proof that some version of Sherlock Holmes and Watson is a weird linchpin holding the entire universe together shows up in Neil Gaiman’s trippy story “A Study in Emerald.” Like Meyer mashing up Holmes with Star Trek, Gaiman spins some Lovecraft by imagining a Victorian London ruled by the infamous many-tentacled Cthulhu. Here, there are numerous Cthulhu, and one of them, a prince, has been murdered. As in the plot of A Study in Scarlet, two men—who we THINK are Holmes and Watson—have just become flatmates, perfect strangers to each other who are rapidly thrust into their inaugural adventure. Gaiman toys with his characters’ awareness of the existence of alternate realities: “I have a feeling we were meant to be together,” one says, “that we have fought the good fight, side by side, in the past or future, I do not know.” The twist here is that we figure out by the end that this isn’t Holmes and Watson at all, but rather, fucking Moriarty and his right-hand man and trigger-finger, Colonel Sebastian Moran.
