The Future as Seen from the Past

Hugh Ashton

Preface

This lecture was originally delivered at Kensington Town Hall on October 22, 2016, as part of the Celebration of Science 2016 organised by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. My thanks are due to the Mayor of the Royal Borough, Mrs. Elizabeth Rutherford, with whom I had the pleasure of conversing following the lecture. and who suggested various other authors who might have been included, such as E. Nesbit.

Many thanks also to my friend Mr. Ashwin Rattan, who was responsible for inviting me to speak, and to all those who took the trouble to attend the lecture.

Lichfield, November 2016

Chapter 1

Introduction

I’ve been invited to talk today on science, fiction, and storytelling, and I intend today to discuss three master storytellers of approximately 100 years ago or more who incorporated science into their fiction: Jules Verne; Herbert George Wells, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I also intend to touch on one not-so-master storyteller: myself, and the 19th-century universe I have created in two novels. There are of course, many other older scientific fictional works of that time or before, notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but for now, I’d like to stick with these authors.

Let me begin by making a distinction between science and technology. By the former, I mean the theoretical underpinnings that form the foundation for the practical applications, that is to say, technology.

If we read an up-to-date overview of the scientific world, for example, Bill Bryson’s excellent A Short History of Nearly Everything, it is fairly clear that a lot of what we learned in school (especially if you learned it over 40 years ago, as I did) is quite wrong. For example, “Animal, vegetable, or mineral” really isn’t precise enough in today’s scheme of things. What are mushrooms? Or bacteria?

And did dinosaurs really die out? It seems they didn’t. We see them flapping around us all the time, if we are to believe those who know these things. Birds are the linear descendants of dinosaurs, it seems.

Chapter 2

What is scientific fact?

So our views of what is scientific fact change all the time, and to write scientific fiction, we must base our stories around the science we know at the time of writing. We can expand our scientific worldview a little (perhaps develop some sort of hyperspace framework if we want interstellar travel), but on the whole, we are stuck in our own frame of knowledge and the rules of science that we know - the universes we create must be predictable, repeatable and ultimately falsifiable, if we’re going to discuss these things in Popper-ian terms. Otherwise, we are writing fantasy, where magic swirls around in ways that make no sense, other than to drive the particular story in which the magic exists. Having said which, there are writers, such as Zelazny, whose magic obeys fixed rules, and may almost be regarded as a science. Terry Pratchett’s magical Discworld also follows its own set of somewhat loony rules as well.

And let me emphasise that a good story is necessary. There must be a plot, characters, tension, emotion – all the things that a good story possesses. Too often, science fiction can be either an excuse for showing off the author’s powers of scientific imagination, or a future society which acts as a fable or a parable, describing either a utopia or dystopia. I leave you to think of your own examples here.

Anyway, with the benefit of 100 years or more of hindsight, I’m concentrating on some high visibility examples of the past’s vision of science in fiction.

Chapter 3

A Journey to the Centre of the Earth

So let’s start with a few dinosaurs – not those of Arthur Conan Doyle’s lost world this time, but those of Jules Verne in his Journey to the Centre of the Earth, first published in 1864.

Verne’s goal in publishing this, and other titles of the Voyages Extraordinaires, was, according to his publisher:

“to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format that is his own, the history of the universe.”

Pierre-Jules Hetzel

Pretty ambitious, you have to admit. Of course, Verne was more than just a populariser of science. He was a storyteller of some considerable skill. He himself said, “I have tried at the same time to realise a very high ideal of beauty of style. It is said that there can't be any style in a novel of adventure, but it isn't true.” It would be nice if the Dan Browns of today’s world realised this.

Incidentally, the earlier English translations of Verne’s work are inaccurate, and employ a stilted style. Verne’s 19th-century French has a beauty all of its own, which in my opinion has yet to be reproduced faithfully in English.

But, on to the centre of the earth. The heroes are a famous scientist and his nephew. A good start – we can expect to see some scientific analysis here. And we do, very early on – Sir Humphry Davy, the famous English scientist, is quoted as being a supporter of a particular geological theory, which contradicts the idea that the centre of the earth is a hot liquid mass. Unlikely, by the way, that Davy actually held the theory expounded here, but it’s possible that he did.

It’s worth remembering that even at this date of 1864, geologists had, for the most part, abandoned any belief in a Biblical creation of the world. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published only a few years before, and the idea of a much older earth than the Biblical narrative was accepted by many geologists, led by Charles Lyell. By presenting us with lists of rocks and the eras, Verne was popularising theories regarding the geological history of the earth.

In keeping with his aim of giving his readers all available information, Verne presents us with a travelogue of early 19th-century Iceland, which doesn’t sound terribly attractive (but then the narrator is only there reluctantly in the first place, and my sister-in-law, who recently visited, would probably agree with Verne. Personally, it’s a place I would like to visit, and my opinion is backed up by several friends who’ve been there).

The scientific instruments (special thermometers, barometers, compasses, chronometer) carried by the expedition are listed, and special geological features of Iceland, and others, including the incidence of leprosy, are described, sometimes at length.

Practical measures such as the way in which ropes are used to descend into the abyss are described in detail – it is almost possible to imagine Verne actually physically testing the mechanics of his heroes’ operations as he writes. The technology, such as the electric lighting carried by the explorers, is also described in some detail, but I fear that even if Verne’s description of the interior of the earth were accurate, three men could not carry sufficient supplies to sustain them for the time described. The emotions of his characters are fully described as well, even as the prose goes into exhaustive technical geological and paleontological detail.

Perhaps one of the most dramatic scenes in the book is when the intrepid explorers are crossing the subterranean sea, and witness a battle between two dinosaurs, each described in detail, following the best guesses of the paleontological community of the day.

In fact, in this book, Verne seems to have achieved his goal of providing the reader with an exciting adventure story, which even includes a romance – the narrator is in love with a girl whom he has left behind on the surface, and he never ceases to remind us of the fact – but at the same time, manages to give a reasonably exhaustive overview of the earth sciences as they were understood in the mid 19th century.

Chapter 4

The Lost World

Now let’s turn to a different set of dinosaurs – those of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Lost World – a book which almost certainly served as part inspiration for Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, just as another of Crichton’s novels, The Andromeda Strain, would seem to be inspired by another of Doyle’s Professor Challenger stories, The Poison Belt.

Now, much as I admire Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for many things, and though The Lost World is indeed a ripping yarn in the best traditions, and full of quirky, rather dry, Scottish humour, it lacks Verne’s desire to educate. Though Professor George Challenger is, like Verne’s Professor Otto Lidenbrock, a maverick scientist, the learning that leads to his unconventional theories is not explained as fully, and the scientific underpinnings of the tale, though the story is marginally more plausible than Verne’s, are not so detailed.

The Lost World was written in 1912, some 50 years after Verne’s book, and in that half-century, quite a lot had gone on in scientific circles. The idea that volcanoes were the product of surface action had been completely exploded, if you will forgive the pun.

Evolution was an established generally-held theory by this time, and Challenger and Summerlee are well aware of the fact that dinosaurs and advanced mammals such as the apemen that they encounter on the South American plateau were not contemporaries with the Indians who also inhabit the lost world of the plateau, let alone the dinosaurs, but they come up with explanations which resolve this discrepancy, as well as hinting at mysterious, but unexplained conditions.

“evolution has advanced under the peculiar conditions of this country up to the vertebrate stage, the old types surviving and living on in company with the newer ones. Thus we find such modern creatures as the tapir – an animal with quite a respectable length of pedigree – the great deer, and the ant-eater in the companionship of reptilian forms of Jurassic type.”

We must forgive Doyle the supposition that dinosaurs were reptiles. Up until recently, this was generally believed to be the case, at least in the children’s books of popular science. Of course, now we believe that we are surrounded by dinosaurs, flying all around us – in the form of birds.

Even so, the idea that there may, somewhere in South America, exist people who go to work flying on the back of a pterosaur, or go out for an iguanodon steak for breakfast, still has an appeal. Fred Flintstone will bear me out on this.

Chapter 5

The Poison Belt

I’d just like to look at another piece of Doyle fiction, The Poison Belt, which is more of a novella than a full-blown novel.

The science here is based around astronomy – and right at the beginning, reference is made to “Fraunhofer’s lines”. This is not new science for Doyle – Fraunhofer died in the first half of the 19th century, and the story was written in 1913 – but it is explained quite clearly and succinctly.

Of course, the æther – the invisible, intangible, and ultimately unprovable “fluid” which was held to account for the transmission of light and energy through a vacuum, makes an appearance here. In fact, as a concept, it seems to have survived as a valid scientific hypothesis until the acceptance of the special theory of relativity. In fact, the “poison” of the story is in the æther, as shown in the spectroscopic analysis, and not in the atmosphere, which is one of the cruxes of the story.

Challenger and his friends observe a living amoeba in a sealed box, and according to Challenger:

“This specimen was mounted yesterday and is hermetically sealed. None of our oxygen can reach it. But the aether, of course, has penetrated to it, as to every other point upon the universe.” [ emphasis not in the original]

The “of course” is one of the delights of this speech, but it has been made clear previously that the æther, as understood here, is far from being a gas:

“There is not a greater difference in quality between a brick-bat and a gas than there is between oxygen and æther. They are different planes of matter. They cannot impinge upon one another.”

But before we start laughing at these early 20th century scientists with their æther, we may ask ourselves what, in a hundred years time, will physicists make of our 17- and 21-dimensional string theories?

There is another, happily exploded, scientific viewpoint of the times, which promotes a degree of evolution to the different “races” of mankind, with the northern Germanic races being reckoned to be the most hardy and highly developed specimens of homo sapiens, and the Australian aboriginals and those of Africa coming lowest on the scale.

“The less developed races have been the first to respond to its influence. [... ]The Northern races have as yet shown greater resisting power than the Southern,”

says Challenger. How far Doyle was making his character echo his own views, I am unsure, but the idea of the Northern races being a more evolved, superior type of being was not unknown as a scientific “fact” in those days.

However, it seems unquestionable to me that Doyle is speaking through Challenger later in the book, where he talks about mankind being the end product of evolution, to which evolution will inevitably aspire, however many times the process is restarted. Also, and this prefigures his later interest – we may almost say obsession – in Spiritualism, there is a long discussion on the immortality of the soul.

“As to the body,” remarks Challenger, “we do not mourn over the parings of our nails nor the cut locks of our hair, though they were once part of ourselves. [...] The physical body has rather been a source of pain and fatigue to us. [...] Why then should we worry about its detachment from our psychical selves?”

Of course, this takes us from the realm of physics into metaphysics, but Challenger, the epitome of rationality, like his creator, who also created the arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes, is prepared to consider a non-corporeal survival following physical death.

Chapter 6

20,000 Leagues Beneath the Oceans

Of course, Verne wrote many other well-known books, and especially well-known is his Vingt Mille Lieues Sous les Mers, usually translated as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Personally, I think this is a very poor translation, and a new translation of the whole of 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Oceans (note the plural), a much more descriptive and accurate title (and I see that Wikipedia agrees with me here), is needed. It’s something I intend doing some time when I have a free decade or so.

Anyway, the monsters in 20,000 are those which we know and love in today’s oceans. Incidentally, Verne takes a little dig at himself when he makes the Canadian harpooner, Ned Land, say,

“Que le vulgaire croie à des comètes extraordinaires qui traversent l’espace, ou à l’existence de monstres antédiluviens qui peuplent l’intérieur du globe, passe encore, mais ni l’astronome, ni le geologe n’admettent de telles chimères,”

or

“Even though the public at large may still believe in amazing comets which pass through space, or the existence of ancient monsters living in the centre of the earth, you won’t find astronomers or geologists believing in these fantasies”.

[my translation]

A sly dig at his own work, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, written a few years earlier. He also, seven years after 20,000, published the work known in English as Off on a Comet, describing exactly the sort of thing that Ned Land is scoffing at.

The technology is plausible for its time – an electric submarine whose features prefigure many of those found in submarines in use today, and advanced diving equipment – not totally outside the realms of possibility, though a dive to 16,000 metres as described is still beyond the capabilities of even the most advanced deep-sea submersibles of today.

The narrator, Professor Aronnax, works hard with facts and figures to explain the pressure that deep-sea life must withstand, and also gives some facts about marine biology which fulfil Verne’s promise to educate as well as to entertain. He uses the servant, Conseil, to explore the classification of marine life with us, but Aronnax also chimes in, at exhaustive – and exhausting – length. Long lists of Latin names punctuate the narrative, and I think 99% of readers will skip these pages.

Other information about different forms of marine life makes its way at intervals throughout the books. Indeed, just as Centre deals with geology, 20,000 may be said to deal with marine biology in minute and comprehensive detail, even if it does read like an encyclopaedia entry at times.

The other major scientific knowledge imparted by this book is that of marine geology. Tectonic plates and seafloor spreading were unknown at the time of writing, but Verne discusses submarine vulcanology, especially with reference to the lost land of Atlantis, as it was understood when he was writing, and provides us with a guide to the geohistory of the oceans, as well as to voyages of discovery by Europeans. Verne made, however, one major false conjecture, which was unprovable or undisprovable at the time he made it – I refer to the discovery of open sea close to the South Pole, while, however, admitting certain theories which make the existence of a continent in that region probable.

It has to be said that as a story, 20,000 Leagues is superior to Journey, thanks to the characters of Nemo and Ned Land, the Canadian (interesting choice for the nationality of the “common man”) as well as the constant tension of “how will they escape?” and the psychological pressures put on the characters.

Chapter 7

H.G. Wells – Two Wars

Now we turn to H.G. Wells. His two “War” novels, The War in the Air, and the better-known The War of the Worlds, are often classed as science fiction, but they both fall into the “parable” school of SF, rather than the educational works of Verne, or the more entertaining but still scientific Professor Challenger adventures of Conan Doyle.

Both these works in fact, Worlds in 1898, and to a much greater and obvious extent, Air in 1907, were part of a British paranoia about a possible invasion by Germany. Though this literary sub-genre really came of age in 1903 with the remarkable novel Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, tensions between the British and the German people, if not between the British and German governments, were continually rising, and the development of the rigid, long-range, load-carrying airship by Count Zeppelin fuelled British fears, as on the other side of the North Sea, German fears were fuelled by the development of the Dreadnought class of battleship. Hence the production of The War in the Air – a book which deserves more attention than I think it has had so far. In many ways, it prefigures the writings of Douhet and Balbo, the advocates of aerial bombardment as a war-winning strategy, which so influenced Britain’s “Bomber” Harris and the US Curtis LeMay (not to mention Hermann Goering), and still, sadly, continues to dominate much, especially American, military thinking.

But this is all technology, not science. The War of the Worlds is much more what we would term “science fiction”, but again, technology, rather than science per se, is a key driver behind the story.

As an aside, I re-read the book recently, and was struck by the very bleak, almost spare, style of writing that Wells uses, compared to the florid, almost baroque style of Verne’s prose, and the “ripping yarn” style of Doyle. This is not to disparage Wells, by the way. To tell a story well in this bald unadorned style takes skill, and Wells does tell the story well, even if there is a little too much pre-figuring in the story for my taste (“I did not know it, but this was the last civilised dinner I was to eat for many strange and terrible days”, etc.).

So let’s look at the science in Worlds.

First, of course, is the astronomy. At the time that the book was written, the existence of canals on Mars was, if not an established scientific “fact”, at the least a well-established theory worthy of serious consideration. The existence of intelligent Martians was therefore a possibility in the timeframe at which this was written, and the age of the red planet compared to that of the earth is given as a rationale for this.

There is a description of Mars, as it was then understood, in an attempt to explain the launching of the invasion probes by the Martians, and the arrival of the probes is explained, according to the knowledge of meteors and meteorites at the time.

What everyone remembers about this book, though, are the fighting machines, and the lasers (though of course, Wells doesn’t call them that). Let’s look at what he wrote about the latter:

“This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light.”

I suppose it would be too much to expect Wells to predict the existence of coherent beams of energy (light or heat), but the idea of a heat ray started a lot of speculation later on regarding the development of death rays to shoot aircraft from the sky, or to sink dreadnought battleships.

Interestingly enough, for a story that I remember as being based mainly around technology and engineering, the crux of the story comes from a pure science angle. The Martians are defeated, not through any weakness in their mechanisms, or in their planning, but by simple facts of biology.

Wells spends quite a lot of time discussing the possible evolution of the Martians to their state as described; brains with vestigial bodies, and also the lack of an immune system against bacteria (though he doesn’t use that precise term). Here, once again, as in The Lost World, pure science, in the form of evolutionary biology, plays an important role in the plot.

Chapter 8

The Time Machine

And now let’s turn to another of Wells’ best-known fables – The Time Machine, the inspiration for so many stories and films.

I call it a “fable” rather than a “novel”, because Wells was clearly, as in so much of his work, attempting to teach us a lesson about ourselves and about society. And to a certain extent, he has succeeded. The Morlocks and the Eloi have become almost as much a part of our everyday language as Big Brother and WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, from that other great dystopia.

The Time Traveller expounds on his theory of time as the fourth dimension at some length, and comes up with the announcement that he has come up with a machine “that shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as the driver determines”. He says,

“Scientific people know very well that Time is only a kind of Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer. Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then this morning it rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally recognised? But certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must conclude was along the Time-Dimension.”

He goes into many ingenious explanations as to how to avoid the paradoxes of time travel, which is something that every writer who is brave or foolish enough to consider writing a story about time travel has to face. Wells does as good a job of explaining the inexplicable as can be expected, but it is uphill going.

But the technology of the Time Machine itself is left vague and unexplained. Hardly surprising, really, when one considers that such a machine is still considered technically impossible – notwithstanding some interesting paradoxes that occur at near lightspeed.

However, the imaginative power of Wells comes to the fore when describing the rapid journey through time:

“Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that consequently my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring.”

Bear in mind that this was written in 1895 - we are now familiar with time-lapse photography, but it’s a tribute to Wells’s powers of imagination that he could visualise such a thing. At the end of the book, he describes the end of the world (in astronomical terms), using the science of that time to predict the state of the earth in several hundreds of thousands of years from now.

Again, though, evolution, this time, describing the move towards the two distinct forms of humanity, forms the keystone of the whole story – the Time Machine itself is merely an appendage to Wells’s sermon to us.

Chapter 9

The Untime

Let me move onto another warping of the space-time continuum, this time in my own The Untime, a science-fiction novel set in 19th-century Paris. Here, I imagined a state which lay outside time and space. If you will forgive me, I will quote my fictional Professor Lamartine and the narrator:

“To begin my explanation,” he continued, “do you remember that I told you that these new dimensions were not to be measured in metres and centimetres?”

“I do. In what should they be measured, then?”

“In seconds, minutes and hours.”

I considered this briefly. “You mean, then, that these new dimensions are time itself?”

“Yes, indeed. They are temporal, rather than spatial dimensions.”

“No wonder that I cannot imagine them, since they are invisible to me.”

“But you can see their effects, can you not? You are aware of the passage of time and of its effects, surely? And what I have done is to render these dimensions visible, or at least tangible, in such a way that we can move freely along them.”

“But how?”

“I can give you an analogy,” Lamartine told me. “Let us return to Flatland, and its inhabitants. For our flatlander to travel from one side of his world to the other, he must traverse the width of the paper, must he not?”

“That much seems obvious.”

“But what if the paper on which his world exists is folded in half? Then he is able to move directly from one side to the other.”

“I begin to grasp your meaning.”

“What I have done, I believe, is to bend or fold the fifth dimension so that the relations between the three spatial dimensions and time become flexible. I was able just now to manipulate that watch so that it moved forward in our time, while not moving in space, or its own time.”

I envisaged a universe in which one could enter this Untime, a state which is neither time nor space, and once entered, allowed the subject to move instantly, mainly by the power of one’s mind, to whatever time and place in the universe one desired. Incidentally, this is quite similar to the Under-time and Under-space imagined by Neil Gaiman in a story, the title of which I have forgotten, but which I read long after the publication of my stories. I am sure that Gaiman didn’t steal the idea from me, and I certainly didn’t steal from him. Great minds thinking alike?

The mechanism developed by Lamartine is a thing of steampunk wonder, all mahogany and brass, with crystal columns and electrum plates. I have not the faintest idea how it works, though, any more than Wells knew how his machine worked. I make references to the æther, that mysterious non-substance that dominated much of 19th-century and early 20th-century physics, as well as hints regarding atomic physics as it was then understood.

So what I produced essentially was a science-fiction novel without any firm scientific backing, unless you count the metaphysical ramblings about temporal dimensions to be scientific. But then, when it came down to it, neither did Wells.

Time travel, as I discovered, is a very tricky thing to write about. I painted myself into a corner with one particular near-paradox and really only escaped from it in the sequel to The Untime, entitled, imaginatively enough, The Untime Revisited.

In this sequel, I largely abandoned the hard sciences in favour of a more psychological approach, and some of the ideas in the sequel owe something to Carl Jung’s ideas of archetypes. I also make reference to “that Viennese charlatan, Freud,” as one of the characters in the book refers to him. More than a little H.P. Lovecraft crept into the sequel, too, with the idea that monsters from a different universe have invaded our subconscious throughout history, leading to the idea of demons, and deities such as Moloch or Dagon.

However, it is with a great sense of satisfaction that I find I can write about the past, and refer to those scientific theories which have long entered the museum of exploded science, as being “modern” and “up to date”.

Chapter 10

Conclusion

In conclusion, I find it interesting how great a role the idea of evolution plays in all these tales. The idea of evolution as a force which shapes and drives us may be out of favour now, but it must have been a very liberating force for a society which had only just discarded the idea of humanity as a one-off fully-formed finished product of the Creator.

So are there any other conclusions we can draw from all of these examples?

Our three older writers, Verne, Wells, and Doyle, had three different ends in view when they were using science as an element in the writing of their stories:

Verne was writing to educate. His grasp of contemporary science was considerable, and he had the skill to make it accessible to the layman. I am sure that he oversimplified in many cases, and that he occasionally used discounted ideas and theories, as in the Journey to the Centre of the Earth, in order to make his points, but one comes away from a Verne novel with the idea of a great sweep of history and of science, as well as from a well-crafted and well-told story.

Wells, on the other hand, was a preacher. His tales are fables, designed to nag us or to shock us into changing into something he saw as being better than our current state. Whether this state was a sense of complacency regarding a foreign (i.e., German) invasion, or a growing social gap between the rich and the poor, Wells wanted to rub our noses in the mess that he saw, and to make us change our ways. Along the way, he delivered an entertaining tale, told in a very simple and sparse style, using science as the driving principle of the future, as his plot device.

Doyle, I feel, had no such pretensions to teach or preach, at least in the Lost World. He was an entertainer, first and foremost, using science as the framework in which to set an adventure. The humour in his stories is there, but it is a quiet sense of laughter, in the form of sly asides, which can actually be missed on a casual reading. As a result, his characters are perhaps slightly more three-dimensional and human than those of the other two writers.

The Poison Belt is another matter, however. The characters are still there – the humour slightly less, but Doyle has a few messages he wishes to pass on – maybe he felt that as a now famous and knighted author, he had a legitimate pulpit from which to preach. His views on the place of humanity in evolution, and on the immortality of the soul echo in spirit Wells’s more earthly exhortations.

As for myself, though I confess to coming from a family of preachers and teachers, my primary aim, like that of Doyle, is to entertain. Ultimately, I have to agree with E.M.Forster’s great line in Aspects of the Novel:

“Yes – oh, dear, yes – the novel tells a story.”

Ultimately that is all that fiction does, and in their different ways, Verne, Wells, and Doyle all incorporate science into their fiction in order to tell us their stories.

Thank you.

About the Author

Hugh Ashton was born in the United Kingdom, and moved to Japan in 1988, where he lived until a return to the UK in 2016.

He is best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories, which have been hailed as some of the most authentic pastiches on the market, and have received favourable reviews from Sherlockians and non-Sherlockians alike.

He currently spends most of his time in the historic city of Lichfield with his wife, Yoshiko, though Japan still has an attraction for him.

More about Hugh Ashton and his books may be found at:

HughAshtonBooks.com

Also by Hugh Ashton

Sherlock Holmes Titles

More from the Deed Box of John H. Watson M.D.

Secrets from the Deed Box of John H. Watson M.D.

The Case of the Trepoff Murder

The Darlington Substitution

Notes from the Dispatch-Box of John H. Watson M.D.

Further Notes from the Dispatch-Box of John H. Watson M.D.

The Death of Cardinal Tosca

The Last Notes from the Dispatch-Box of John H. Watson M.D.

Without My Boswell

1894

Some Singular Cases of Mr. Sherlock Holmes

The Adventure of Vanaprathsa

General titles

Tales of Old Japanese

The Untime

The Untime Revisited

Balance of Powers

Leo’s Luck

Beneath Gray Skies

Red Wheels Turning

At the Sharpe End

Angels Unawares

Titles for Children

Sherlock Ferret and the Missing Necklace

Sherlock Ferret and the Multiplying Masterpieces

Sherlock Ferret and the Poisoned Pond

Sherlock Ferret and the Phantom Photographer

The Adventures of Sherlock Ferret