The Book of the Enemy (short story)

The Book of the Enemy
Main character(s):	Tom
Featuring:	Sherlock Holmes
Main enemy:	The Enemy
Main setting:	London, 1910s
Key crew
Writer:	Andrew Hickey
Release details
Part of:	The Book of the Enemy
Release date:	25 January 2018
Faction Paradox
← Previous	Cobweb and Ivory
Next →	T.memeticus: A Morphology

You may be looking for the anthology or the in-universe book.

The Book of the Enemy was the third story in the 2018 Faction Paradox anthology The Book of the Enemy. It was written by Andrew Hickey and preceded by Pre-narrative Briefing C.

Summary

to be added

Characters

• Tom
• Sherlock Holmes
• Martian ambassador
• Startled gentleman
• Stout man

References

• Holmes and Watson visited Ruritania several times to assist King Rudolf.
• Britain established an alliance with Mars after the Martians' attempted invasion of Earth.

Notes

• The author published a list of references in the story.
  • The framing story was borrowed from P. G. Wodehouse's stories about the "Oldest Member".
  • The narrator recalls Watson's stories about Holmes' "excursion across the moors" (The Hound of the Baskervilles) and his "wrestling match on a precipice" (The Final Problem). He also mentions Holmes' assistance to "Popes" (All-Consuming Fire) and an address in Belgravia (A Scandal in Belgravia).
  • The hypothetical about a man named Reginald who served kippers was a reference to Wodehouse's character Jeeves.
  • As noted in the story itself, Ruritania and King Rudolf originated from The Prisoner of Zenda.
  • The men in the British Museum's Select Manuscript Room – the startled gentleman who spilled his papers, and the stout man who helped collect them – are Dunning and Karswell from M.R. James' Casting the Runes.
  • The account of the Martian invasion of Earth is designed to be consistent with H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds and Simon Bucher-Jones' Charles Dickens' Martian Notes.
  • Holmes' comment about "continental orchestra" is a reference to George Bernard Shaw's complaints about how "British orchestras tuned their instruments to a higher pitch than continental Europeans did".
  • The mentions of "squamous cephalopodic beasts" and "non-Euclidean geometry" are references to H. P. Lovecraft's work; the attribution of Albert Einstein's discoveries to Moriarty is a reference to the description of his text The Dynamics of an Asteroid in The Valley of Fear.
  • The mention of "demons trapped in pyramids" is a reference to The Pyramids of Mars.
  • The "mock turtle soup and dodos' egg" are a reference to the novel Alice in Wonderland.
  • History remembered the Martian embassy as being burned down in the siege of Sidney Street. The siege was mentioned and compared to the Holmes novel The Red-Headed League in Ronald Knox's essay Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes, which first applied the idea of "canon" to works of fiction.
  • The phrase "every trace of romance" was intended to be a reference to Lawrence Miles' novel Dead Romance.

Continuity

• Tom dreams of demons trapped in pyramids. (TV: Pyramids of Mars, AUDIO: The Judgment of Sutekh)
• Sherlock Holmes aided a Pope in PROSE: All-Consuming Fire.
• James Moriarty discovered that non-Euclidean geometry best describes spacetime; this discovery was attributed to Albert Einstein. (TV: Four to Doomsday, The Lie of the Land)