Sherlockiana and the changing technosphere

 I let the devil into a John H. Watson Society meeting today.

Since we started the JHWS Zoom meetings during Covid times, they've been a chatty, free-flowing thing with whatever agenda item I happened to throw in for a given month. Not a good ritual sort, so I'm really not the guy you want hosting regular meetings, but you know how Covid was. We all got out of our routines a bit. The world changed on us.

And for the December meeting, I had decided to do an adaptation of "Blue Carbuncle," as one does around this time of year. But as the meeting grew closer and my adaptation was only half done, I had one of those moments of weakness where temptations find easy prey. 

I wondered how AI would do at adapting "Blue Carbuncle." And Google Gemini was right there on the browser. So I asked it to do a modern adaptation. Then I asked it to set it in Texas, and it rewrote the script to take place in Austin. Then I got crazy and went "Give John Watson a love interest," and Mary Morstan suddenly appeared in the story. And it seemed like a fairly competent script. But I knew . . . I knew . . . this would be very controversial.

But my Sherlockian career has never been about playing it safe. So I decided to let the thing play our as a reader's theater and then have the discussion of how well the AI did after it was received with the thought it was human-produced. But that discussion never happened, as, like so much of modern life, the battle lines have already been drawn with respect to those softwares we group up under the name "AI."

My career working with medical software is a place with AI cannot be denied. Doctors are already cutting hours out of their workday as it helps streamline their note-taking, a usage that's valuable and actually helps them spend more time with patients. And like every other business in America, the upper management is pushing for more AI use. Denial is not an option in most workplaces. The beastie is here and we have to adapt and deal.

In the world of arts and literature, there's a thought that this beastie can be dealt with by just refusing to deal with it. Climb to the moral high ground and outlast the flood. But as much as some Sherlockians would like to remain in a Victorian mindset, be a happy Luddite, and leave it at that, the shifting technological world has already hit us, hard.

Publish on demand printing has yielded more books on Sherlock Holmes in the past few years than ever before. Anyone can publish a Holmes pastiche, regardless of quality. Anyone can publish a book of Canonical commentary, Sherlockian chronology, Holmes fandom memoirs . . . anything. And that was just people who can write.

Now we have a software imp that can let anybody write a book. All you have to do is have an idea and the proper wish given to the genie. All of the arguments against AI -- the somewhat dubious way it grabs its knowledge, the horrible drain on natural resources humans need to survive, that it will steal more jobs than an immigrant force ever imagined -- all of that falls away when the right person is offered the right wish by this new magic. We are, after all . . . human.

I did violate a certain trust in rolling an AI-created script out for a Sherlockian audience without advance warning, even if I did have full intentions of revealing after. Even as an experiment -- my subjects did not volunteer for this experiment. There's definitely some smut on my aura, to use a metaphor from a certain demonic novel series. But the monster is here.

Whether it's publish-on-demand, 3D printed creations, AI-generated video, or a simple reader's theater script, we're living in the future now, and are all going to have to figure out just how that's going to work for us. How we screen what we take in, where each thing can actually serve a useful purpose, and how we stem the flow of garbage that can come from any one of those innovations. 

2026 is nigh, and a future none of us expected. Even here in the Sherlockian world.

Mediocrity and Genius

 "Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius . . . "

-- John H. Watson, The Valley of Fear 

That quote from Watson's introduction of Inspector MacDonald in The Valley of Fear has always stuck with me, even though I often forgetfully attribute it to Sherlock Holmes. It sounds so very much like Holmes, that one can be sure between listening to the man and quoting him, Watson could not help but pick up his friend's tone.

We tend to see a lot of mediocre minds who somehow think they are the standard for great intellect, especially in the personal bubbles that social media creates. Business enterprises are hamstrung again and again by dullards who somehow rise to a hiring position and staff with even duller dullards. But when Sherlock Holmes actually encouraged John Watson to return to 221B Baker Street when both men could well afford to pay rent on individual establishment . . . well, it's a pretty good sign that Watson was a little be brighter than the Nigel Bruce version of the character. (Who never seemed to marry, and thus never left 221B to provide an opportunity for a return, so Rathbone Holmes was pretty well stuck with him.)

The statement can even be a little bit humbling.

On those days when you definitely feel like the smartest person in the room, recalling that quote can make you step back and go, "Wait, am I just mediocre? I know of nothing higher than myself today!" In that little bit of self-check, one can feel a little bit of the Watson humility coming to the fore. 

Watson was constantly recognizing the genius of Sherlock Holmes, but never admitting to his own talent, which that quote would definitely assign to him. He does not suffer nearly so much as Antonio Salieri in the movie Amadeus, where the talented Salieri is constantly frustrated by the fact he can recognize Mozart's genius but never attain it himself.  The final scene of Amadeus, where Salieri is wheeled through the asylum absolving all the mediocre humans as the patron saint of mediocrity, would almost seem the climax of a story inspired by Watson's line. 

There are much deeper waters to John H. Watson than we often realize, and that one line from The Valley of Fear is, indeed, a valley worth thoughtfully gazing into.

The Dangling Prussian Virtual Pub Night 2026

Well, here we are again.

We've been forced to listen to our Sherlockian friends who plan their NYC vacations around that January weekend for months now. And like the Grinch sitting on far-off Mount Crumpit, we might, in a couple weeks, hear their distant singing "Mah-who-Morley, mah-Mic-Sorley . . ." if the algorithm winds carry that tune our way. But, as we have since 2022, the unconventional among us will be gathering again at that mind-tavern of lore, the Dangling Prussian for the annual meeting of the Montague Street Incorrigibles and other indulgences.

So what's on tap for this year, come the evening of Friday, January 9th?

7 PM EST, 6 PM CST, etc. will start the evening with the "Always 1895" Happy Hour, where the Dangling Prussian has always existed since 1991, from it's inspiration in 1914. (Just try to figure that one out, AI, you tinpot toolbag.)  Prepare yourself for more 1895 than you've ever 1895ed before in that first hour of the evening, where we'll be sipping facts instead of drinks as we converse about that world before it all went awry.

8 PM EST, 7 PM CST, etc. shall be the appointed hour for the gathering of current Montague Street Incorrigibles and those who now deign to take the oath of membership as ritual demands and be awarded their official certificate of membership (via email the next day). All you have to do is show up.

9 PM EST, 8 PM CST this year will the the first ever live recording of the Sherlock Holmes Is Real podcast, where you'll get the chance to meet host Talon King, and for the first time, his panel of experts, Dr. Janet Peters, Mrs. Horace "Thingie" Thimbleburger, and Mr. Shecky Spielberg, as we watch and dissect Dr. Watson's actual documentary footage of one of his adventures with Sherlock Holmes.

Sometime after that gets done, in the darker hours of the night . . . our spies will hopefully be reporting in, if they haven't been taken out or incapacitated with something in their drinks (most likely alcohol).  Eventually we'll call it quits, but you never know. We've booked the Prussian until midnight or thereabouts.

You never know who will turn up at a Dangling Prussian pub night. or what may occur. A certain simian professor? Sherlockian bees via YouTube? Guests from far off lands? It'll be a new year and if the last year was any indication, we just don't know what to expect anymore!

Here's the registration link: The Dangling Prussian Virutal Pub Night 2026

Looking forward to it!

Lost Over Canyon Paperless

 When I look 'round the room which houses the collected Sherlockiana that I've picked up over the years, there are shelves of books, yes, but also other gatherings of printed pages.

Journals, newsletters, flyers, monographs, note cards, copies of talks read at meetings. Not always well organized, and always with the knowledge that more lies unseen, in boxes tucked away elsewhere in the house. One likes to think of such things moving to archives somewhere, or to the collection of another Sherlockian when you're gone. But both of those thoughts have one unspoken condition: Someone has to find these things worth storing, and such storage implies that someone will want to read these documents in some future time. That someone will want to spend some of their precious lifetime reading and reviewing the accumulated by-products of your precious lifetime.

Scanning such things into searchable digital form might be fun. And footnote fans love to have a prior instance of some thought like "Nathan Bogspar suggested Watson's gout in a 1975 issue of The Garrideb Gazebo." But at the end of the day, most of this paper was created just to entertain ourselves in the moment, for the writers and readers of that day. And in this day, so many of our Sherlockian writers and readers have gone paperless . . . look at these very words, which shall never see a printed page. 

If you've ever been involved in the sale of used books, you know that even books, that most hallowed of print forms, don't all end their lives gathering dust on shelves. Very popular authors of their year never become classics or even cult favorites, simply because their works were entertainments of the moment. And that's life. That's the ongoing evolution of our culture. Those ideas entered the human hivemind, influenced those who read them, for better or worse, and then were not needed any more. Citizens of a future world had new things to contend with, new entertainments to indulge in.

And consider our newfound frenemy, the artificial intelligence software. It can scour the internet for data, form its conclusions, and learn for its next attempt. But it doesn't have all of the info, does it? It doesn't know some things even exist that didn't make Project Gutenberg or were otherwise noted on Wikipedia or somewhere. And even digital information can wind up unretrievable. Even AI is a thing that lives in the moment.

It can seem so depressing, this ongoing march of history and all it leaves behind, but really, I think it just reinforces what Zen masters have always taught us: Be present in the moment you're in. Enjoy this moment. Let the past go when it doesn't serve future needs. That might seem counterintuitive when enjoying a hobby that is all about a figure from the past, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. History entertains Sherlockians, even the history of Sherlockians themselves. But we can't carry it all into the future with us, and we can't expect others to bear that load for us. 

Sherlock Holmes had the luxury of all his papers and books being contained in stories that continue to be retold. His move to that cottage in Sussex was managed with just a few words on a page. The rest of us aren't nearly so lucky, but that's life. Literally.