Who Remembers "The Best of Trek"?

[Allyn Gibson]

Yes, the Titan Books "Further Adventures" series has been really great. They've reprinted a lot of the more notable Holmes pastiches from the past, like Philip Jose Farmer's The Adventure of the Peerless Peer, Loren D. Estleman's Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula: The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes, Daniel Shastower's The Ectoplasmic Man, and Edward Hanna's The Whitechapel Horrors, along with some brand new ones, so I'm looking forward to Robert's book.

I was really surprised when Titan published Peerless Peer, because the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate was opposed to the book when it was originally released. I was glad that they published two that I'd been looking for for years, Manly Wade Wellman's Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds (though it was badly proofread and had serious layout problems) and H. Paul Jeffers' The Adventure of the Stalwart Companions (Holmes and Teddy Roosevelt work a case together in New York City).

I would love for Titan to reprint the Ellery Queen edited The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, since it hasn't been in print for over 70 years.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

I was really surprised when Titan published Peerless Peer, because the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate was opposed to the book when it was originally released.

Yes. It took me a while to realize that Farmer never once uses the name "Tarzan" in the book. The jungle man is always called either "Clayton" or " Lord Greystoke." It's still incredibly obvious who it's supposed to be, though, so I'm not too surprised it sent up alarm bells with the ERB estate. It's also such a short book that Titan had to fill out their reprint with a Wold Newton introductory essay and a long excerpt from the next book in the series.

Honestly, I'm so-so on the Peerless Peer overall. There are some good ideas in there, but it gets a little too fanboyish and campy, IMO (that ending where Holmes does the bee thing... Ooof).

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Yes. It took me a while to realize that Farmer never once uses the name "Tarzan" in the book. The jungle man is always called either "Clayton" or " Lord Greystoke." It's still incredibly obvious who it's supposed to be, though, so I'm not too surprised it sent up alarm bells with the ERB estate. It's also such a short book that Titan had to fill out their reprint with a Wold Newton introductory essay and a long excerpt from the next book in the series.

Farmer rewrote it in the 1980s, after the Burroughs estate cracked down on Peerless Peer, as The Adventure of the Three Madmen, replacing Tarzan with Mowgli from Kipling's The Jungle Book. I'm fully onboard with your ambivalent attitude toward Peerless Peer; the core idea -- Holmes and Tarzan -- has potential, but the execution is not very good.

 

[TheAlmanac]

I love these books, and have all but #16.

The Best of Trek #16 has a cool essay offering a theory as to how the Guardian of Forever could say "all is as it was" at the end of "City" when a homeless man was vapourised and that event wasn't undone. It provides a surprisingly elegant point of divergence between our world and the Star Trek universe, so you should keep trying to track it down.

My favourite article of them all is "The Fall of the Federation" in Best of Trek #2, a fascinating Foundation-style imagining of how it all ends for the UFP. It really captured by imagination.

I enjoyed that one, too, once I started going back and trying to track down the older volumes...

Both of those articles were ways of playing "The Great Game" in a Sherlockian-fandom sense, taking scant canonical evidence and extrapolating out until you have an imaginative conjecture of your own that still fits in with what came before--which really appealed to me in those years when I was doing that on my own and didn't have the Internet to connect with people elsewhere doing the same thing.

I also loved reading the fanrage against Wrath of Khan. It's amazing how similar complaints about that film mirror those in 2013 about Star Trek Into Darkness. One of the later issues has a nitpicky article ripping Diane Duane's Spock's World to shreds, which had my blood pressure rising thanks to complaints like the stardates being wrong because they don't conform to the author's personal interpretation of how stardates should work. Trek fandom hasn't changed a bit!

It really hasn't.

If there's one thing I took away from reading these books (and old Usenet threads from the Eighties), it's that we just have different versions of the same arguments and gripes that people had thirty years ago or more.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Farmer rewrote it in the 1980s, after the Burroughs estate cracked down on Peerless Peer, as The Adventure of the Three Madmen, replacing Tarzan with Mowgli from Kipling's The Jungle Book. I'm fully onboard with your ambivalent attitude toward Peerless Peer; the core idea -- Holmes and Tarzan -- has potential, but the execution is not very good.

Yes. I've never read that version (I don't own The Grand Adventure -- how GREAT is that Michael Kaluta cover, though?), but it might be interesting to check it out some day.

I kind of wish that Farmer had subscribed to the theory of backdating Tarzan's birth from 1888 to 1872 (IIRC). It would solve "The Great Korak Time Discrepancy" and would've allowed Farmer to have Tarzan and Holmes both be in their prime when they meet.|

I love that scene where Holmes makes all those deductions about Tarzan while he, Tarzan, and Watson are all in the treetops together, though. If the whole book had been at that level, Farmer would've really had something.

Both of those articles were ways of playing "The Great Game" in a Sherlockian-fandom sense, taking scant canonical evidence and extrapolating out until you have an imaginative conjecture of your own that still fits in with what came before--which really appealed to me in those years when I was doing that on my own and didn't have the Internet to connect with people elsewhere doing the same thing.

Yes, I love speculating about that stuff for both Trek and Holmes. I'm actually writing things in both universes right now that are making use of that approach. It's a fun challenge to try and make your stuff fit without going into "Everything you know is wrong."

If there's one thing I took away from reading these books (and old Usenet threads from the Eighties), it's that we just have different versions of the same arguments and gripes that people had thirty years ago or more.

The past is prologue.

 

[Bibliomike]

The past is prologue.

Or, in the words of another famous franchise, "All this has happened before..."