People have front parlours which they never use except on special occasions. Opium is a common analgesic to which vast swathes of the population are addicted.

It's a century which is deceptively familiar - nineteenth century English is much the same as today's, after all, and the men have the common decency to run around in trousers - but also more alien than the far side of the Moon. I've always liked the Victorian era for its sheer preposterousness - a century where table legs are clothed decently, but child prostitution output struggles to meet popular demand. I am, I suppose, nominally a science fiction writer, but I see the genre as being a licence to write anything I damn well please rather than a constraint to confine myself to depicting taut-thewed Lenspersons of the Galactic Patrol. Wells, allegedly the Big Huge Man of Science Fiction, who also wrote a good deal of mainstream material.

Here's what Dominic had to say about this story.Ĭonan Doyle was the Michael Crichton of his time - someone who wasn't 'a science fiction writer' or 'a crime writer', but a man who was capable of reeling off both the Sherlock Holmes stories and the Professor Challenger series, and seeing no problems of genre conflict in doing so.Ĭonan Doyle wrote what he felt would entertain his audience, much in the same way as Dickens or Shakespeare - also, it has to be said, in the same way as H.G. His story Send Me a Mentagram was picked for the prestigious Year's Best Science Fiction anthology in 2003. Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Lost Worldĭominic Green has written several short stories for Interzone magazine, often in a satirical vein.

The lost world sherlock holmes