as well as other recent(ish) Sherlock Holmes novels (some of which can seen further down the page). I guess working in Portsmouth where the public library has a huge Holmes and Conan Doyle collection it's going to inspiring. Even if I could never hope to emulate their holdings. (I also spent the first night of my honeymoon in Conan Doyle's house Undershaw which at the time was a hotel).
Anyway, it was a natural thought to wonder how Holmes might be introduced to the Third Imperium. Perhaps also because I enjoyed the Star Trek: Next Generation episodes with Data as Holmes.
One of the first snags is that's there no real equivalent of a 'Victorian period' despite the long history of Known Space. Milieu 0 feels pretty much like the 1100s just with slightly less technology and of course a much small Imperium. I've not seen a great deal on the 'other' historical setting - the Interstellar War period - and that tends to be combat focussed. (I suppose you could at this point consider the Orbital setting or even the Roswell setting as other older periods but not really what I had in mind.) I guess I'm really thinking of things along the lines of how might fashion/architecture etc be different in the Psionic Suppressions (800s) or the 300s or whatever.
Or is this just a failure of my ability to write sufficiently well to delineate such periods?
Another difficulty is along the lines of one that I think Jeff Z and I have discussed although I can't recall if was privately or publically (i.e. on TML). Would the The Third Imperium of 1100 have any record of Solomani literature from three or four thousand years previously? And even if they did, would there be any chance of it being culturally significant knowledge? (My quick answer would be yes, possibly, to the first; very unlikely to the second.)
So I've thought of various approaches to using the character:
- just set an adventure on Terra in the Victorian era (but this seems to lose something of what would be Traveller). There was a White Dwarf adventure that did this with a Vargr as a werewolf but I don't think it included Sherlock.