"The Bruce-Partington Plans" are secret plans for a submarine. Does that make this Sherlock Holmes story sf? At the beginning of
Tale Of The Flying Mountains by Poul Anderson and of
They Shall Have Stars and
Welcome To Mars by James Blish, a scientist gets on the track of gravity control or antigravity. If a scientist in a contemporary novel did this, then the novel would be not only fiction about science but also science fiction. I remember a spy film in which a scientist was thought to be working on antigravity but was found to have been getting no results but nevertheless letting interested governments think that he was making some progress. Not sf? There can be borderline cases and any given example might be one of them.
(There was a Holmes film in which the Loch Ness Monster was, anachronistically, a submarine. Anachronistic because the "Monster" phenomenon had not started that far back.)
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I recall how, after either I or Jim mentioned TALES OF THE FLYING MOUNTAINS, Stirling commented that real world gravity control might be at least theoretically possible.
I wouldn't call that Holmes story using submarines exactly science fiction. Because there had been attempts at making submersible devices as far back as the US War of Independence (and later, during the Civil War). I'm assuming that by the 1880's/1890's real progress was being made in how to build true submarines by the US, UK, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
Re: Submersibles in US Civil War.
I thought I recalled the name correctly, and Google told me I did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Hunley
Kaor, Jim!
Correct, the "Hunley" was a Confederate Navy submersible which sank the first time it attacked a US Navy warship. It was very experimental!
Ad astra! Sean
The problem with Civil War submersibles was that there was no non-combustion source of power for them, so most of them ended up being cranked by the crew.
It needed the combination of IC engines and electrical storage batteries and engines to make submarines really practical -- in other words, by the 1890's. After that, development was rapid.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I remember reading of how inadequate that hand cranking was.
Maybe Germany would have been wiser focusing on building submarines, not surface battleships. The Reich was never going to have a surface Navy bigger than the combined fleets of the UK and France. A really powerful sub fleet might have wreaked devastation on Entente shipping in 1914-15.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: but Kaiser Willie had a bad case of battleship-envy...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Granted, but the obsession with battleships wasn't all Kaiser Wilhelm's fault or limited to him. German admirals like Alfred von Tirpitz pushed hard for a big surface fleet, with von Tirpitz being greatly influenced by the US Admiral Alfred Mahan's theories about naval power.
Ad astra! Sean
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