Conan Doyle had his obsessions. He must have been more like #Holmes than is perhaps generally realized. He said Holmes was modeled after Joseph Bell, a surgeon he knew, but there are traits of Holmes in Conan Doyle.
One of his obsessions was submarines. He was convinced submarines were the key to war, and if Britain didn't immediately dig a Channel Tunnel (!) to France, it would certainly lose the next war.
Sherlock Holmes, of course, saves Britain’s submarine plans in “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” (1908). Conan Doyle's fears burgeoned; on the eve of WWI, he wrote "Danger!: Being the Log of Captain John Sirius”, told from the p.o.v. of the captain of an enemy submarine. Britain is so ill-advised as to start a war with this apparently much weaker enemy; with just a handful of subs, the enemy cuts off British food imports, and brings Britain to her knees in just a few weeks.
A lot of interesting European history is contained in an exploration of the way Conan Doyle was both right and wrong.
it's good to talk about something besides the election, or partisan politics in the US. On bluesky nobody is, or apparently ever does.
@CoolerPseudonym You know Conan Doyle was nearly right about submarine warfare? If Poland hadn't cracked the ENIGMA cypher and sent their notes to the UK where GCHQ followed up and read the U-Boat's orders over Doenitz's shoulder the UK would have been epically fucked during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1940-43. U-boats came much closer to starving the UK into submission than the Luftwaffe ever did by bombing.
Also note: Conan Doyle also wrote SF, eg the Professor Challenger stories.
@cstross I did know that! I read “the lost world” when I was a kid; I just recently read the Challenger story “The Poison Belt”, which is genuinely strange. Worth a glance if you haven’t.
@CoolerPseudonym Submarines were *very* science-fictional in the late 19th century, is my point about Conan Doyle, even though they were kinda-sorta real: like reusable space launcher's in the late 20th century. Much the same technothriller vibe.
Nov 5, 2026, 10:11 AMI’m a Capt. Nemo fan myself.
Capt. Nemo is similar to The Professor on Gilligan’s Island, who was what I wanted to be 60 years ago. Both could start with coconuts [or probably seashells in Nemo’s case] and work out the schematics for a submarine with its own power source from first principles. [Don’t ask why The Professor wasn’t able to patch a two-foot hole in a wooden boat.]
@OldCoder I’ve never seen Gilligan’s Island. (It wasn’t on any British TV channel when I was growing up and I mostly gave up watching TV thereafter.)