If there is one field of endeavor that I don't worry about AI poking its stupid robot head into, I think it's the world of Sherlock Holmes pastiche.
Well, let me correct that . . . I do worry that someone is going to waste valuable electricity, processing time, server usage, all that stuff to make an AI do something that we already have a cheaper resource creating a constant supply of.
Remember celebrating the freeing of Sherlock Holmes into the public domain? Remember going "Now ANYONE can write a Sherlock Holmes story!"? What we didn't consider then was that not just anyone, but everyone would decide to write a Sherlock Holmes story.
What's that you say? You haven't written a Sherlock Holmes story yet? Let me ask you a question: Have you retired from whatever you did in the mainstay of life? No? Wait for it. You'll get there.
And everybody gets one. I mean, ya gotta try it.
Show your most brutally honest friend. Get someone to really beat it up. Send it to someone crazy enough to be collecting stories for some new volume called Yet Another Casebook of Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Everybody gets one.
And, if you're really into it, if you really feel the need and you've survived critiques of your first story, or your friends find your work entertaining, keep going. But here's the thing . . .
Sherlockian fandom is a community that some of us live in. We're not a market for selling late-in-life attempts at authorship by copying existing IP. We are, for the most part, a welcoming community, especially for minor celebrities. But if the first time we see someone, they're trying to sell us a book? And that's the only time we see said person.
And we have plenty of pastiches. We don't need salesmen knocking on our community door trying to sell us another one and then heading down the road to the next fandom house trying to sell that group on their next thing. Sure, some kindly soul is gonna let said salesman in our house, invite them to dinner maybe, but we're not running into the streets and throwing a parade for something we're already swimming in.
Okay, rant over, but while we're on pastiches here's one more thought: Every pastiche is an adaptation, if you think about it. Even if an inhabitant of 2024 tries to match every Victorian thing they can think of, they're still not British Victorians . . . and heck, even British Victorians weren't Conan Doyle. So it's all adaptation of some sort. So why not go whole hog and show us something new? One of the greatest things that BBC Sherlock brought to us, at least to this burnt-out old fan, was the wild experimentation of fanfic putting Holmes and Watson in wildly different roles, environments, and bodies. Wonderful exploration of the characters, and it showed us things we might not have seen about our Baker Street friends.
Think about it.
Okay, post-rant thought over.
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