A supernova (pl. supernovae) is a stellar explosion. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy...
It is not supernatural; nothing is. It is preternatural in the sense that it is not known to our ordinary senses. It is the effect of the joining on the one hand of imagination, and on the other hand of some power of materialization. The imagination, I may say, comes from me — the materializing power from elsewhere.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, before showing test footage of the film adaption of his The Lost World at the American Society of Magicians (1922). The New York Times ran the headline DINOSAURS CAVORT IN FILM FOR DOYLE.
2010
Sherlock thinks London at night is greater than any star.
From the top of a tall building, looking down, it is just a sea of light: the white lamps of taxis and cars stalled by beacons of red; a sea of warm amber interspersed with the flashes of reflection from joggers and the neon signs of clubs and bars; the veins of darkness that are the unlit alleyways and backstreets that to Sherlock feel more like home than 221B Baker Street.
John envies him in many ways, because all he can see is a great, choking mass of modernity - complications and hidden meanings and a language of signs and signals that he has forgotten how to read, that are so far way from the heatadrenalinedanger that was his home in Afghanistan. He puts on so many fronts of normality, of civilisation, that he doesn't know what people would find if they peeled them all back.
It scares him a little that Sherlock could probably find out, but at the same time he can't help but admire the way he takes things apart and puts them back together again in a way that makes more sense than before.
Sometimes he wishes Sherlock would do the same to him.
The only place in London that feels like home for John is the world in the shadow of his flatmate, a world where people have brothers who control elections on the other side of the planet and enemies with a personal army that costs more than the UK defence budget. It's a world that is too fantastical to exist, but it somehow does anyway, and somehow it is now partially his.
1886
He dreams of cities with fingers of glass that reach towards the sky.
He dreams of almost ten million shadows in acres of coloured lights.
He dreams of screaming metal carriages barging and pushing, nose-to-nose in every corner of the city they can get at.
Looking out over his city, cloaked beneath heavy smog and inches of dirt and with the lowest of humankind lying in the gutters, he finds that his time awake scares him more than his time asleep.
He knows that the fingers of glass will grow out of this place and the lowest of humankind will be their makers and the screaming metal carriages will carry them between patches of light, from across the whole world, for he knows he dreams of London - but he does not know how.
Sherlock! someone had called in his mind, a lost soldier chasing at the scraps of a life remembered.
John? another had answered, fascinated by those things he can't understand.
He once was astonished by a teacher of his, in the same way the lost soldier was, and he wonders if others would react the same. He does not understand the ways of the world and why he knows these things, so he puts pen to paper and writes the two others who are under the same spell.
The conceptual intertwining of reason and imagination in the twentieth century yields modern, secular enchantments that replace the supernatural enchantments of the premodern period...
The Holmes stories reflect Doyle's ambivalence about modernity.
-Michael Saler, 'Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes: Mass Culture and the Re-Enchantment of Modernity, c. 1890 - c. 1940', The Historical Journal, Vol. 46 No. 3 (September 2003) pp. 599-622
2012
Sherlock hasn't got bored of him.
Mycroft thinks that someone is going to go after one of the athletes at the Olympics, something about drug dealing on an almost national scale and corruption and blackmail - things which are complicated only because there are so many layers to them, not because there's anything especially clever about them; the sort of thing which Sherlock hates but which they owe (John owes) too much to Mycroft to ignore.
John is like that. Beneath all his layers is something a little dark and twisted - but it is a very simple thing all the same.
And yet Sherlock hasn't got bored of him.
"Dr. Watson," Mycroft says, making John start in his chair and almost knock over his empty cup of tea, "Did you pay attention to any of that?"
John doesn't bother to disguise an embarrassed wince as he sets the cup to rights - there is no point in lying to either brother. "Enough that Sherlock will be able to work out the rest."
Mycroft smiles. "That will have to do, I suppose. You can go now."
But he says, "Dr. Watson," as John's hand falls on the door handle, and then: "John."
When John looks Mycroft has lost the superior air he seems to carry around; that he knows just how smart he is and just how smart you are, too. He always seems to look half-playful, like arranging the politics of half the countries in the world is just a game to him - which, to be fair, it is.
Now Mycroft looks more serious than John has seen him in any international crisis, but at the same time softer, more human, and he is reminded that only one of the Holmes brothers self-diagnoses as a high-functioning sociopath.
"He might not always be able to show it," Mycroft says, "But my brother is very fond of you."
1893
His fellows think they are modern, that rationality and empire and modernity makes Britain greater than it has ever been before, but he sees a Britain of the future which is both lesser and far, far greater than anything the many subjects of Queen Victoria can conceive of.
They mock him for his spirits, for believing in the otherworldly, but what else could he possibly believe in when his descendants will live in a fantastical world and none of them will ever, ever know it.
He wishes he could forget the future - it taunts him in his dreams, with medicine and machinery that leaves him feeling powerless and childlike. He has given up his practise; cannot stand any longer losing patients and remembering how simple the future would have made keeping them alive. But he remains a doctor at heart, and he still has to see people killing themselves a little at a time whilst thinking it does them good, or believing they can call a man evil by the shape of his face, and his heart can't let go of the future where science is no longer guesswork and alchemy.
Holmes (Sherlock!) and Dr. Watson (John?) have their own lives in that world, and he wishes they wouldn't intrude on his - wishes they could leave him alone and he could happily wallow in the ignorance of his fellow men. At the same time that he remains captivated by their adventures, they leave him ill at ease. He is not sure, anymore, how to reconcile the future and his own life, his own writings - his own Sherlock Holmes.
Because Holmes is the product of another time altogether and he is starting to worry that he may become so, too.
Society is founded on Hero-worship.
Thomas Carlyle, originator of the 'Great Man' theory of history, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History (1841)
If it be a fact that the great man may modify his nation in its structure and actions, it is also a fact that there must have been those antecedent modifications constituting national progress before he could be evolved. Before he can re-make his society, his society must make him. So that all those changes of which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the generations he descended from. If there is to be anything like a real explanation of these changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have arisen.
Herbert Spencer, a rebuttal of the 'Great Man' theory in The Study of Sociology (1873)
Does it matter if our heroes aren't real, as long as there are heroes?
2016
"Who was your childhood hero?" John asks.
He's not really sure where the question came from, except recently he has been noticing that people on the street look at him like they can't quite believe what they've just seen; that Sherlock's clients now ask for 'Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson', not just the famous detective.
Sherlock looks up from plucking at the strings of his violin. His fingers hover over them for a while longer, and then he sets it down and puts his hands together and says: "What do you think my answer will be?"
John bites his lip on a don't-know, because Sherlock has been trying to get him out of the habit of doing that when he actually means haven't-thought-about-it.
"One of Christie's detectives?" he suggests. "Not the old woman, you'd hate the all the coincidences - Poirot, maybe."
"Not someone closer to home?"
"Too boring - too normal."
Sherlock smiles.
"Good guesses," he says. "You're learning, John."
John doesn't really feel like he's learning. He follows in Sherlock's shadow and sometimes he remembers how his friend put things together and when things fall into place in a similar enough way he can mimic him. Mostly he's just reinforcing old skills: medical, evaluating; how little has Sherlock eaten recently? Stamina. Looking like he belongs in places he doesn't. Shooting. Trying to feel he has done something right afterwards, and not just something good.
"But no?" he says.
"But no," Sherlock repeats. "No, I don't know if you will have heard of my childhood hero. Somewhat obscure."
John smiles, a little thinly. "Most things about you are."
"True," Sherlock allows, as modest as he ever gets. "Have you heard of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Author. Victorian."
"He sounds familiar. I think Harry had to read something of his for school."
"The Lost World?"
"...Dinosaurs?" Sherlocks nods. "I know of it. Not much."
"Professor Challenger." Sherlock picks up his violin abruptly. John becomes an afterthought again. This happens sometimes, when a case becomes so engrossing that Sherlock forgets everything, or when - as now - something comes up that reminds him of the past, the time before John. Sherlock has never said as much, of course. But John is not so terrible at the science of deduction, no matter what Sherlock thinks (what he thinks of himself).
"Mycroft made me read it," Sherlock murmurs, so quiet that John barely hears. "I think Challenger was his 'hero' for a while, too. Ed Malone walks into a room and doesn't say a word. Challenger already knows what he's there for, and he tells him how he worked it out."
"Is that where you got your idea for deduction from?"
Sherlock hums gently, 'yes' when he can't bothered to say it.
John settles back in his chair. His flatmate - best friend - is still such a mystery to him, and it's so rare that he opens up willingly. All John has of Sherlock's childhood are snatches of stories from the man himself, and the hints and knowing smiles of Mycroft.
"I thought most people wanted to be their childhood heroes."
"I did," Sherlock answers, a little defensively. He has been like that, recently, when someone implies that he's not normal but something worse. He never used to be and John doesn't know when and what changed. "But being a professor of deduction had been done. Too boring."
"So you became a consulting detective instead."
"Obviously." He plucks at one of the strings.
"Something new. Something that hadn't been done."
Sherlock narrows his eyes at John over his violin, tilting his head in the way that he does when he's trying to work something out. "Yes..."
John just settles back in his chair and smiles and lets Sherlock try to work out what he means.
Eventually Sherlock runs out of patience. He puts his violin down again. "What?"
"Nothing," John says, because he loves sounding like he's stating the obvious to Sherlock. "Just that it's very... you."
Sherlock normally frowns at this point. This time he smiles.
Twice in one conversation is a good day for John.
"My family is related to the man who inspired Professor Challenger, you know," Sherlock says - offhandedly, in the way that means he wants John to be impressed. When he isn't, Sherlock watches him from the corner of his eye and adds, "Distantly, of course."
"Of course," John says.
Sherlock frowns at him. "He was Conan Doyle's professor at university."
He picks his violin up and starts tuning it. John decides to humour him. "Oh?"
Sherlock doesn't move his head, but his eyes flicker to John, and don't look away. "He was a doctor."
John blinks, and gets the feeling that he is being given a huge compliment - he certainly feels the compliment, heart-warming in a way that only Sherlock can manage because when Sherlock tries it means so much more - but he doesn't quite know how. "Runs in the family then, does it. The doctor best friend thing."
"Not really." Sherlock runs his fingers across the strings. "Perhaps it should."
And John is reminded, again, that despite what people say to him, that he could never belong anywhere else but with this man.
Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind...
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)
1900
His literary counterpart may be dead, but the dreams of Sherlock Holmes keep coming.
Sherlock - Holmes - has grown too large to be contained. Everyone believes in him, believes in him more than he can ever do, even though he knows the consulting detective is real. Everyone believes in him because Holmes is confined by Victorian decorum (because the future is so lax, everything is allowed; there is so much depravity and immorality but at the same time the world is so perfect and hardly anyone ever dies) and in many ways being brought up in rigid social rules makes him so much better.
He hates that he knows this and he hates that he thinks of his own people - himself - as 'Victorian', that he knows his Queen dies next year and he knows he will lose his son on muddy fields in the Land of No Men and he knows he will be largely forgotten, an irrelevance to humanity.
He knows that, he has seen it, seen one of his characters - that he has not written yet, that cannot be like that even if he does - become the inspiration of the man (the legendary, the iconic) who haunts him no matter where he turns. But now he receives letters every day begging to see the famous detective solve another case; so many people refusing to believe that he is dead when in the other world so many people wanted so hard to believe exactly that.
When he is thought of as the creator of something like that, there is no way he can possibly be forgotten, and he despises himself for it. Years ago he would have wanted so desperately to be remembered, and now he is being remembered for recording the life of a man who has yet who live, who he should not know, who he does not wish to know - because Mr. Holmes has become himself, his face, and only he knows how terrible a man (high-functioning-sociopath-do-your-research; not-good?; what-is-it-like-in-your-tiny-little-brains) Sherlock really is.
Can one be haunted by the living? Because the dreams come thick and fast now. Sometimes he wakes with their names on his lips. He looks for a mobile telephone that won't exist for over a hundred years. He despises the sluggishness of telegrams, that the other side of the world feels as far away as it actually is.
Modernity repels him because he has started to think of it as historians do; as an older time, which could not see anything better.
But he thinks, too, that in the future they can only see his time's arrogance, and not its merits.
Sherlock Holmes must come back to life. If he can reach so many through the words of a man not of this time, maybe he can make them think—maybe he can give modernity something truly modern and leave the future with the thought that not everything in the past is old in the way they mean: outdated.
The dreams may come, but he does not need them. Sherlock has his own life, but Holmes has taken on a life of his own, and he can do better.
There are enough great men. Holmes needs to be a good one.
2020
John knows that he is in great shape, especially for a man nearing his fifties—but bloody hell, does there need to be so much running?
"We should really hire someone to do this bit," John says to Sherlock, once Lestrade catches up in the car to take their murderer away. "You know, the chasing."
"Nonsense," Sherlock says. "What young person would put up with us?"
Any of them, John thinks. Sherlock must know it too; they both get asked for autographs daily, and only the other day a boy of about ten told Sherlock very earnestly that he wanted to be like him when he grew up. (Sherlock said, 'Why wait until you're an adult?' and John said, 'Sherlock definitely isn't' and Sherlock gave him a foul look) They are now a whole module on criminology courses and there's an entirely unofficial 'Holmes and Watson' exam at the Police Academy.
But he lets it go because he trusts that Sherlock has his reasons and he knows his old friend well enough by now to know that, as much as Sherlock would like everyone to think he knows everything, sometimes it's not that you're beneath him and just that he can't articulate what he means.
If Sherlock works it out, he'll tell John. And later, he does.
"It will have to be just us," he says. "It can't be—anyone else would spoil the magic."
John frowns. It's unlike Sherlock to be so dense. "Magic?"
"You know, John, better than me." Sherlock flounders. "The autographs. All the comments on your blog. The—everything."
Ah. That's why. Peopleness still eludes him, even if it doesn't bore him as much as it used to. "The mythology."
"Yes!" Sherlock says, clapping his hands together. "Perfect. Mythology. Yes. We've been made into mythology, John, and we can't spoil it by suddenly being real."
If we're very, very lucky, Lestrade said to John—a long time ago, now—when he said Sherlock was a 'great man', He might even be a good one.
"Do you understand?" Sherlock says, and it must be important to him, because he has never spoken to John before with such helplessness, with so little idea of what he actually means.
But then, that's quite like them. Sherlock is brilliant and John is human, and they both fill the gaps in the other.
"You said once that there were no heroes," John says slowly. "But it isn't quite true."
Heroes might not exist in reality. He and Sherlock are flawed and dangerous, and probably both really ought to seek psychiatric help, to be honest.
But reality is not really quite what anyone else sees.
"They've made us into heroes," Sherlock says. "And it's not... well, it does good, doesn't it?"
It's so simple, in the end.
"I did wonder why you'd started playing nice for the media." John smiles. "But you're not really being you, are you? It's another one of your yuppie disguises."
"Heroes can't be yuppies," Sherlock says with disgust, and from there it descends into deep literary analysis of what a 'hero' is.
(On John's part, at least, though Sherlock plays along well enough, the public-school-educated little bastard.)
But that conversation stays with John for the rest of his life. Holmes and Watson and the Mythology of Modern Heroism is his final blog post after Sherlock's death, but he sets the readership to 'Only me' and reminds himself why the world being in mourning for mythology has its own merits.
I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one's weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can't all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Stark Munro Letters (1894)
A/N: I started this just after series 1 finished, but to the best of my knowledge it still fits canon. (I really need to catch up.) The opening quote about supernovae is paraphrased from the Wikipedia article but all other quotes are real and attributed to their proper authors to the best of my ability.
I really love the Sherlock Holmes stories, and really enjoyed the show, too, but I always felt like they didn't *quite* match up. There's a kind of, eh, 'morality' in the Conan Doyle stories which BBC!Sherlock seems to reject. This is the result of me exploring that.
The original title was 'On Spiritualism' but this came to me as I was uploading it and I think it fits the finished product better.
This is sort of uh, experimental I guess. I would really like to know what you think, so please review! Even if your response was 'um, what just happened?', I'd love to hear from you.