The Amazing Dr. Darwin

by Charles Sheffield

Not that Darwin—his grandfather!

18th Century Europe: It is an age when superstition is beginning to give way to the force of human reason, and no man so fully embodies the spirit of the times as Dr. Erasmus Darwin. Thinker, healer, and explorer of the bizarre and the seemingly supernatural, no mystery can stand for long against Darwin’s enlightened analysis. And there are far more mysteries than history know…

For Erasmus Darwin’s world is filled with oddities that most cannot believe: from unknown beings lurking just outside the boundaries of civilization, to anomalies that even the greatest natural philosophers will be hard-pressed to explain, to mysterious deaths that give rise to fears of malevolent sorcery.

And when the renowned Dr. Darwin is called upon to heal a man dying of an ailment that seems impossible, he has no idea that it is the beginning of a quest that will lead him to the darkest corners of Europe, and a stunning encounter with the most famous inhabitant of a certain Scottish loch…

Genres: Fantasy, Mystery, Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Adventure, Historical Fiction

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Charles A. Sheffield (June 25, 1935 – November 2, 2002), was an English-born mathematician, physicist and science fiction author. He had been a President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and of the American Astronomical Society.

His novel The Web Between the Worlds, featuring the construction of a space elevator, was published almost simultaneously with Arthur C. Clarke's novel about that very same subject, The Fountains of Paradise, a coincidence that amused them both.

For some years he was the chief scientist of Earth Satellite Corporation, a company analysing remote sensing satellite data. This resulted in many technical papers and two popular non-fiction books, Earthwatch and Man on Earth, both collections of false colour and enhanced images of Earth from space.

He won the Nebula and Hugo awards for his novelette "Georgia on My Mind" and the 1992 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Brother to Dragons.

Sheffield was Toastmaster at BucConeer, the 1998 World Science Fiction Convention in Baltimore.

He had been writing a column for the Baen Books web site; his last column concerned the discovery of the brain tumour that led to his death.

He was married to writer Nancy Kress.

Reviews

[Tim Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Note: published 2002, stories are older than that.

My four-star rating is against what Sheffield was trying to achieve - a lightweight entertainment that introduces us to an interesting real person. Well, sort of.

Dr. Darwin could have actually done these things. Sherlock Holmes, often mentioned in reviews here, is not limited by being based on an actual person. And we do learn a fair bit about Charles D's grandpa.

As I read these, I imagined myself reading one a day while comfortably ensconced in a huge leather chair at my club, with a liqueur on the side table.

If you want hard SF from an author with solid credentials, go read Sheffield's other work.
This is what he might have written while at a summer cottage, and should be judged as such.
I enjoyed it.

It's also refreshing to read a puzzle/mystery that does NOT include:
(a) an imbecilic senior police officer
(b) people being served meals and ignoring them because they are Thinking.

[Gintautas Ivanickas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pirma mintis žvilgtelėjus į pavadinimą – apgauna. Ne, čia ne apie tą Darwiną, kuris apiplaukė „Bigliu“ aplink pasaulį ir faktais bei prielaidomis sugadino gerą istoriją apie Edeno sodą, žalčius bei bebambius Ievą su Adomu. O paantraštė (The Adventures of Charles Darwin's Grandfather) iškart ir paaiškina, kad pasakojimas suksis apie kitą Darwiną – Erazmą, ano senelį.
Taigi, Anglija, aštuonioliktojo amžiaus pabaiga. Pasakojimo centre – tikras gražuolis: storas, rauplėtu veidu, be priekinių dantų... Užtat guvaus proto. Garsėjantis ne tik kaip puikus gydytojas, bet ir šiaip neįtikėtinai guvaus proto žmogus, kuris neis miegot, jei internete kas nors neteisus... e... atsiprašau, jei kažkokia mįslė dar neįminta. O mįslės pačios susiranda Erazmą – tai kažkoks jūrų velnias, saugantis lobius užutekyje, tai banalus iš Vidurio Europos atsibeldęs vampyras, tai demonai, gyvenantys senose kasyklose, tai... Žodžiu, mįslių pakanka.
Knyga – trumpų istorijų rinkinys, ne tik savo struktūra primenantis Conan Doyle Šerloko Holmso nuotykius. Daktaras Darwinas, iš eisenos (gerai, kad ne iš žingsnių garso) nustatantis žmogui diagnozę. Jo palydovas, jo Watsonas – pulkininkas Josephas Pole‘as. Kad ir kaip bežiūrėsi – įkvėpimo šaltinio nuslėpt Sheffieldui nepavyks. Tiesa, anaiptol ne visos „bylos“ susijusios su nusikaltimu. Bet užtat visos iš serijos „pelėdos visai ne tai, kas atrodo“. Tai, kas iš pradžių rodosi mistikų mistika, vėliau, Darwinui ištarus „Elementaru, Pole‘ai!“, paaiškinama visiškai racionaliai. Na, ok, to žodžio iš „E“ raidės jis neištaria. Bet ką tai keičia?
Charles Sheffield kur kas geriau žinomas kaip mokslinės fantastikos rašytojas. Bene keturios jo knygutės buvo pasirodžiusios ir lietuvių kalba. Geriau ir būtų likęs prie fantastikos. Kaip literatūrinis pažaidimas – pusė velnio. Kaip savistovis kūrinys – kiek silpniau.
Trys iš penkių. Bet skysti trys.

[Adam Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first visited Lichfield, I gave myself too long in that small City. I’d spied all the Samuel Johnson things I’d come for, spent hours in the Birthplace Museum and hunted out the other places he knew so I went into the Erasmus Darwin House as something to do. I knew little about the man then and I was amazed at the scope of his interests, the depth of his scientific knowledge, the influence of his poetry and the sheer likability of the man. Then I read a biography of him, it was more hagiography than biography and it cooled me to him a little.

There’s a very fun series of books by Lillian de la Torre called Samuel Johnson: Detector. In them, Samuel Johnson is cast in a Holmesian role with Boswell as his Watson. They’re good fun even if the prose is a little wooden. Having read those, I was excited to see Charles Sheffield had done a similar thing with Erasmus Darwin, though Darwin’s cases have a more supernatural flavour, X-Files in the late 1700s.

This book is a collection of stories where Darwin, flanked by Pole, loosely based on one of Darwin’s associates, find themselves amidst something strange or supernatural and Darwin, using his keen analytical eye find out the truth behind them. The first story in the collection even has a cryptozoological air, with a trip to Scottish Lochs where a seabeast awaits. The first story written, the last in the collection also includes an evolutionary left turn - but the rest of the stories were rooted in reality, to an extent.

The mysteries were pretty engaging. I guessed the twist of the ‘Lambeth Immortal’, because something similar happened to my Mum at a gig, so the little clues jumped out a bit at me but mostly I was left feeling like I’d seen a good trick without being tricked. My favourite story was ‘The Heart of Ahura Mazda’, which reminded me a little of the series Jonathan Creek. Indeed, Darwin and Pole would make for fun Sunday tea-time adventures, I’d watch that.

I found the most important element of the book to be Darwin’s detecting methods. Unlike Holmes, he mades iron clad deductions that always prove correct, Darwin makes adductive hypotheses that he then tests and rules out. As such, he doesn’t investigate from a position of certainty or authority, but one of openness an testing. He describes how he has many theories but needs a sieve to sort them out, or that he hasn’t added two and two and made twenty, but subtracted two and two and made zero.

A lot is made of his skills as a diagnostician - rather like another Holmes-inspired character, House. While Darwin was a respected doctor and had a particular knack at knowing if a patient was going to die, I found his fame as a medical man was too emphasised. The plots of three of the stories partially existed because of this reputation and he seems to be a famous man because of it. As well as not squaring with my impression of Darwin, there was less emphasis on his poetry, engineering and other skills - though some Lunar Society members get mentions.

Because they were short stories publishes in different places, we get some of the same beats when it comes to setting up our characters. We are always informed of Darwin’s weight and his missing front teeth and of Pole’s malaria - it grows a little repetitive and might have been edited out a little when being put into a whole book. Reading them altogether, it also becomes an oddly repetitive motif that it’s always winter or autumn in the stories, I guess for atmosphere in each one, but it becomes a bit of a bingo card.

That said, I think the writing was better than the Samuel Johnson: Detector series and I really enjoyed Darwin and Pole together. I also liked how Darwin was unlike other detective figures, he has his quirks but they were quirks of Erasmus Darwin, not detectivey ones. It’s nice to read a detective story where the protagonist is a fat, content, intellectually curious man who gets on with people and is always ready to eat a big meal. It was nice to have a decent man at the centre of things, not brooding or moody, figuring problems out with an intelligence that is motivated by curiosity and wonder. It’s a nifty little book and praises a praiseworthy man.

[Kam · Rating 2 out of 5]

The name "Darwin" is likely one to ring a lot of bells for a lot of people, mostly because the most famous bearer of the name, Charles Darwin put forward the theory of evolution. His fame, however, casts a very long, very large shadow over the rest of his family, who may have had been remarkably notable in their own right, except now no one knows about them because of Charles Darwin's fame.

One such notable Darwin is Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather. He was a highly notable physician, regarded as the best in his day - a reputation that led to him being invited to be Royal Physician in George III's time. Erasmus turned down this post. He is also noted as being the founder and key member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a group which counted such notables as Joseph Priestley, James Watt, and William Murdock amongst its members - men whose discoveries and inventions would help launch the Industrial Revolution. It is also speculated that Erasmus's musings on natural philosophy would eventually - along with the writings of other scientists - influence the development of his grandson's own landmark theory.

Charles Sheffield's book, titled The Amazing Dr. Darwin, is actually a collection of stories, dealing with the adventures of Erasmus Darwin and his friend, Colonel Jacob Pole (likely a stand-in for the real Erasmus Darwin's own friend, Colonel Edward Pole) as they solve unusual cases the length and breadth of England. In the first story, titled "The Devil of Malkirk," Darwin and Pole (who meet here for the first time) head to Scotland to solve a medical mystery (Darwin) and to find treasure (Pole), though the two are actually linked in more ways than one. The second story, "The Heart of Ahura Mazda," finds Darwin and Pole in London, looking into the curse supposedly laid upon a fist-sized ruby to protect it from thieves. "The Phantom of Dunwell Cove" has Darwin and Pole looking into the strange disappearance of jewelry from a group of wedding guests. In "The Lambeth Immortal" Darwin and Pole attempt to make sense of the existence of a murderous creature that supposedly inhabits the bottom of an ancient flint mine. "The Solborne Vampire" is, as the title implies, about a vampire - whose existence Darwin (and Pole, naturally) seeks to disprove, or at least make sense of. The final story, "The Treasure of Odirex," starts out with Darwin being called to prove or disprove the mental condition of a man's wife, but it soon leads to something else entirely.

On the surface, with such simple summaries, the stories seem to be quite entertaining, and admittedly, they are. Each one has a touch of the supernatural to it, one which Darwin quickly dispels with his medical and scientific knowledge. Pole, in the meantime, provides a kind of support to Darwin; he might not necessarily be Darwin's equal in the mental realm, but he more than holds his own when there is any action that needs to be undertaken. This is not, of course, to be mistaken as any reluctance on Darwin's part to do anything beyond sit and think; merely a reflection of the fact that, due to his weight (a somewhat legendary thing, in his time), Darwin simply was not as capable as Pole in executing more physically taxing actions.

Despite their differences, Darwin and Pole are rather well-matched, despite Pole's credulity in all things supernatural, and Darwin's distinct incredulity (which he extends to religion). They are also rather entertaining in their quirks: Darwin with his prodigious appetite (well-documented by contemporary accounts), and Pole with his obsession for treasure (he claims to have chased it all over the world, whenever he could).

Unfortunately, for all the possible advantages that the above attributes present, they are not nearly enough to make these stories stand out, especially when one puts them alongside the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - stories whose pattern Sheffield seems to have adopted or adapted for his own use in these tales. Though the characters themselves seem fascinating, after the first three stories the reader almost gets bored with them, mostly because they seem rather static: the reader already knows what Darwin will do in a given situation, because it's exactly what Darwin did in the last story. While there is certainly some pleasure to be derived in such predictability (after all, Sherlock Holmes is quite predictable in terms of how he will approach a case, at least in the general sense), there is no such pleasure in Darwin's brand of predictability. Also, while Darwin might have been quite interesting on his own, Colonel Pole is really not that interesting in the least. He is not nearly so entertaining as Watson - though I suppose one can get to like Watson because he is the primary narrator for the Holmes stories (for the most part, at any rate), and a reader must at least like the narrator if they are to make any kind of headway. His mania for treasure, especially, might grate on readers after a while, not least because of how predictable it makes him.

Another major flaw is the stories themselves. The potential for world-building is incredibly high, and yet the reader receives very little of it, with a significant amount of interesting information being condensed into a series of end-notes. It's possible to blame the fact that these are short stories, and so there is a very limited space for world-building of the detail I might like, but it might also be to blame for a host of other problems, including the fact that these stories simply never get as good as they could be. Each of the short stories, on their own, would make a pretty rip-roaring good novel - all the elements for one were right there, but they are never used to their full potential. The mysteries could have been made richer, deeper, and more involved than the simple puzzles they turned out to be. The chief joy in reading mysteries, after all, is to get caught up in a proper set of unusual events, and solve them alongside the protagonists, and to get sense of quiet satisfaction when, at the end, all is revealed and our suspicions are proven right - or wrong, as the case may be.

There is no such satisfaction in these stories. The short story form, while noteworthy and enjoyable when applied to the right kind of tale (some of the most notable Sherlock Holmes stories are short stories), simply does not work for the kinds of mysteries that are in The Amazing Dr. Darwin. They are too big for the short story form, presenting potential that is quite literally stifled and buried by the limits of the form they were written in. Character development, too, is constrained by the limits of the form, and so characters who might have been interesting to the reader given time are done a great disservice because there is no chance for them to truly grow.

The Amazing Dr. Darwin is a rather sad case: a case of six - six! - potentially intriguing novels, nipped in the bud because they were written in the wrong kind of form. As it stands, this book might be a worthwhile introduction to a young-adult reader seeking to get into the more "mature" (and by this I mean more intellectually challenging) side of the mystery genre, or for someone who is looking for something light and not too involved. But for someone looking for a serious read, for a book they can settle into for a while, then this is certainly not the book to read.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of 6 light, kind of cozy mystery stories. Easy to read, with tidbits of historicity clinging to it. Nice for a gentle read, with each story having a bit of medical paranormal spin to it.

I could see it being a schtick for a 1980s style Murder She Wrote but with Erasmus Darwin. That would be eminently watchable.

[Govno Nichevo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought that this was a pretty good read. Reminiscent of Sherlock Homes stories. I thought that this collection of mysteries was reasonably entertaining and that the historical context added to the entertainment.

[Jesus Basuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

just very, very fun engaging short stories

[Tommy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A blast! It is sort of SF but really riffs on the whole Conan Doyle Sherlock story structure. Basically something weird happens somewhere and Dr. Darwin (his Grandfather) gets called in and solves the mystery by the appliance of observation, science and rational thinking.

However short the stories are, and some are a couple of dozen pages at most, there is still a full set of characters which are well rounded and picked out with a few salient details. The stories themselves are based on 'true' stories from over the UK - basically a local myth like the loch ness monster. However there is a real sense of humour as well as pathos, which seem uneasy bedfellows but actually do appear in most of the stories.

I borrowed this from Eugene - have you got any more?

[Rob Bradford · Rating 1 out of 5]

A series of detective stories, featuring Dr Erasmus Darwin.

Many flaws, but far from unreadable. I found the prose a bit dull; the characters rather flat, overcompetent, and unsympathetic; and the culprits generally obvious (although it may well be that this is part of a deliberate homage on the part of the author to Sir Doyle's work).

My one-star review is based more on the basic problem that, 24 hours after finishing the book, I can't remember any of the stories clearly except the one with the Loch Ness monster -- and I only remember that one because the introduction of what I perceive as a supernatural element jars a bit with the rest of the stories.

[Ushan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poorly written Sherlock Holmesian stories involving Erasmus Darwin (Charles's grandfather), a monster in a Scottish loch, Bonnie Prince Charlie dying incognito in Scotland (the person who died in Rome was supposedly his body double), an analogue of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine run in a manner similar to Wolfgang von Kempelen's Turk by a concealed dwarf who was a mental calculator, and so on. Do professional writers often have to write such crap in order to put groceries on the table?

[Boyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book focuses on Erasmus Darwin, although most of you are probably familiar with his grandson, these are short stories, where Darwin applies rational thought to counter supernatural claims; look for a special appearance by a man by the name of Ben Franklin.

[Jared · Rating 3 out of 5]

A so so collection of short stories similar to a Sherlock Holmes novel. If you need a break from all those detailed series, this is a quick read.

[Lynn Calvin]

baen ebook

[Katya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much like Sherlok Holmes, but worse...

[Deedee · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?3...
Contents
001 • Introduction (The Amazing Dr. Darwin) • essay by Charles Sheffield
003 • The Devil of Malkirk • [Erasmus Darwin] • (1982) • novella by Charles Sheffield
071 • The Heart of Ahura Mazda • [Erasmus Darwin] • (1988) • novelette by Charles Sheffield
113 • The Phantom of Dunwell Cove • [Erasmus Darwin] • (1995) • novelette by Charles Sheffield
159 • The Lambeth Immortal • [Erasmus Darwin] • (1979) • novella by Charles Sheffield
209 • The Solborne Vampire • [Erasmus Darwin] • (1998) • novelette by Charles Sheffield
257 • The Treasure of Odirex • [Erasmus Darwin] • (1978) • novella by Charles Sheffield
319 • Appendix: Erasmus Darwin, Fact and Fiction • essay by Charles Sheffield