I just read Charles Sheffields's The Amazing Doctor Darwin. It's a collection of his short stories featuring Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.

I am now looking for a biography of this man, who fame has been overshadowed by his grandson. He was accounted as England's finest medical doctor, who advocated scientific medicine. He organized the translation of Carolus Linneus's taxonomy into English. He was a co-founder of the Lunar Society, a club of English gentlemen that would create the Industrial Revolution and play a leading role in science. (Members included Joseph Priestly, Josiah Wedgewood, and James Watt.)

Sheffield, a well-respected author of hard science fiction, uses Darwin as a Sherlock Holmes. He is called upon for medical problems of supernatural aspect, and discovers the truths behind them. All are solved with science that was just becoming known at the time: Joseph Priestly, for instance, was a member of the Lunar Society, so Doctor Darwin has reason to know of "dephlogistinated air" (carbon dioxide) and it's effects. That sort of thing.

Of course, no homage to Sherlock Holes is complete without a Watson, and so Sheffield attaches Colonel Poole as a neighbor and friend to Darwin. The real Darwin was friends with such a man, but Sheffield admits taking entirely unwarrented liberties with their association. Such are the demands of fiction.

In general, I liked these stories. I think Sheffield wanted to show a more believeable Sherlock Holmes. Darwin deduces much from a stranger upon first meeting, but his perceptions seem much more reasonable: he looks as a master diagnostician, and thus sees signs of consumtion, heart disease, childhood rickets, chronic malaria, that sort of thing. None of the "Red mud on your boots and purple wool gloves means you took the 4:14 Express which means you live in the town of Obscure, Anglia", which annoyed me about Holmes. Darwin is a genius in these stories, but a believable one.

Which is a good thing, as he was a genius in life.

Posted by: Boviate at 07:23 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 336 words, total size 2 kb.