"More Than Simple Murder"

"You See but You Do Not Observe."

By Robert J. Sawyer (born 1960; Wikipedia HERE and the ISFDb HERE).

First appearance: Sherlock Holmes in Orbit (1995).

Reprints page (ISFDb HERE).

Short story (10 pages as a PDF).

Online at the Baen Free Library (HERE).

   "I am a scientist—and I have used certain scientific principles to pluck you from your past and bring you into my present."

THE big question is, "Where are they?" But an even bigger question is, "What's Sherlock Holmes going to do about it?"

Principal characters:

~ Watson ("There was no sensation associated with the chronotransference, except for a popping of my ears which I was later told had to do with a change in air pressure"), Mycroft Holmes ("My parents weren't that cruel"), Sherlock Holmes ("In a very real sense, my good, dear friend, you killed me"), and Moriarty ("It was all I could do to keep from drawing my pistol and putting an end to the blackguard").

References and resources:

- The story title:

  From "A Scandal in Bohemia" (HERE).

- "the Fermi paradox":

  "The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, 'If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now'." (Wikipedia HERE.)

(Click on image to enlarge.)

- "the Drake equation":

  "The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy." (Wikipedia HERE.)

(Click on image to enlarge.)

- "Dyson spheres":

  "A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its solar power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to imagine how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet's resources alone. Because only a tiny fraction of a star's energy emissions reaches the surface of any orbiting planet, building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "Like in the stories of Verne and Wells?":

  "His [Verne's] novels, always well-researched according to the scientific knowledge then available, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time." (Wikipedia HERE.)

  "As a futurist, he [Wells] wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility and biological engineering before these subjects were common in the genre." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "The capacity for the human brain to store and retrieve information is almost infinite":

  Size isn't everything:

  "Other animals, including whales and elephants, have larger brains than humans. However, when the brain-to-body mass ratio is taken into account, the human brain is almost twice as large as that of a bottlenose dolphin, and three times as large as that of a chimpanzee. However, a high ratio does not of itself demonstrate intelligence: very small animals have high ratios and the treeshrew has the largest quotient of any mammal." (Wikipedia HERE.)

  "The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash drive. Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage." (Scientific American.com HERE.)

- "the neural nets":

  "A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either biological cells or mathematical models. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a network can perform complex tasks." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "that terrible case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra":

  Mentioned by Watson in "The Sussex Vampire" (HERE); the story is (HERE).

- "an Austrian physicist named Erwin Schrödinger":

  "Schrödinger was not entirely comfortable with the implications of quantum theory referring to his theory as 'wave mechanics.' He wrote about the probability interpretation of quantum mechanics, saying, 'I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.' (Just in order to ridicule the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, he contrived the famous thought experiment called Schrödinger's cat paradox . . .)" (Wikipedia HERE.) Also see Wikipedia (HERE).

- "Alphonse Karr" and "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose":

  "Karr is remembered for many of his statements, including the well-known aphorism plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose usually translated as 'the more things change, the more they stay the same.'

  "On the proposal to abolish capital punishment, he wrote: 'je veux bien que messieurs les assassins commencent' (i.e., 'let the gentlemen who do the murders take the first step')." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "holography":

  "Holography has been widely referred to in movies, novels, and TV, usually in science fiction, starting in the late 1970s. Science fiction writers absorbed the urban legends surrounding holography that had been spread by overly-enthusiastic scientists and entrepreneurs trying to market the idea. This had the effect of giving the public overly high expectations of the capability of holography, due to the unrealistic depictions of it in most fiction, where they are fully three-dimensional computer projections that are sometimes tactile through the use of force fields." (Wikipedia HERE.) Also see Wikipedia (HERE).

- "the Very Large Array of radio telescopes":

  "The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) is a centimeter-wavelength radio astronomy observatory in the southwestern United States. It lies in central New Mexico on the Plains of San Agustin, between the towns of Magdalena and Datil, approximately 50 miles (80 km) west of Socorro. The VLA comprises twenty-eight 25-meter radio telescopes (twenty-seven of which are operational while one is always rotating through maintenance) deployed in a Y-shaped array and all the equipment, instrumentation, and computing power to function as an interferometer. Each of the massive telescopes is mounted on double parallel railroad tracks, so the radius and density of the array can be transformed to adjust the balance between its angular resolution and its surface brightness sensitivity." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "That you and Moriarty had plunged to your deaths, locked in mortal combat":

  Events chronicled by Watson in "The Final Problem" (HERE).

- "that case of the infamous Colonel Sebastian Moran and his victim, the Honorable Ronald Adair":

  Referring to Holmes's "resurrection" in "The Adventure of the Empty House" (HERE).

- "that gifted Italian, Guglielmo Marconi":

  "Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi (1874–1937) was an Italian inventor, electrical engineer, physicist, and politician, known for his creation of a practical radio wave–based wireless telegraph system. This led to Marconi being credited as the inventor of radio, and winning the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun 'in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy.' His work laid the foundation for the development of radio, television, and all modern wireless communication systems." (Wikipedia HERE.)

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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