his collection contains six substantial stories featuring Erasmus Darwin, the polymathish ancestor of the more famous theorist of evolution. (Twenty years ago, Sheffield published a mere three of these adventures in a volume titled Erasmus Magister, but the current offering is the first definitive assemblage.) The elder Darwin (1731-1802)—as we are informed by Sheffield in an introduction, afterword and story notes—was arguably the most famous English medical practitioner of his era. Additionally, he was both a poet and a talented dabbler in the natural sciences, hanging out in the "Lunar Society" with such fellow luminaries as James Watt, Joseph Priestly, Josiah Wedgewood and Samuel Galton. A thorough skeptic, Darwin showed himself as endlessly curious and inventive. Taking off from this historical portrait, Sheffield has turned Erasmus Darwin into a kind of 18th-century Sherlock Holmes, giving him a Watson-style assistant in the form of one Col. Jacob Pole, an ex-military man and irascible treasure hunter.
The two men meet for the first time in the book's opening adventure, "The Devil of Malkirk." A pair of vagrants succumb to a mysterious illness in Darwin's neighborhood. They babble of a lost treasure in Scotland, at Loch Malkirk, before disappearing while the doctor's back is turned. There's nothing for it but to visit Loch Malkirk, where an enormous lake-dwelling beast ties in with the appearance of the immortal magician Paracelsus and with Scottish rebels.
"The Heart of Ahura Madza" takes place in London, where an exhibition featuring a cursed jewel is the scene of a mysterious murder. Darwin's discovery of a scientific basis for the curse is merely the initial unraveling of the hoax. Romance rears its seductive head in "The Phantom of Dunwell Cove," as Kathleen Meredith prepares to marry Brandon Dunwell. But the ghost of dead brother Richard Dunwell, a murderer, seems intent on foiling the marriage.
An ancient flint quarry, older than history, seems to contain a demon that has plagued the Alderton family for generations in "The Lambeth Immortal." As the current scion, Philip Alderton, lies abed from wounds suffered at the demon's claws, Darwin seems oddly fixated on a curious machine he has had constructed. ... Poor Helen Solborne is wasting away. Her brother Thomas is convinced that a strange foreigner, Prof. Anton Riker, has placed Helen under vampiric influence. But what Darwin soon discovers reveals Helen to be not quite the innocent victim she at first seems.
Closing out the volume, "The Treasure of Odirex" involves fiends that dance nightly on a strange hill. Darwin and Pole will be forced to plunge beneath the earth at great risk to their lives to solve this particular puzzle.
Intriguing, Asimovian puzzles
Charles Sheffield has produced some entertaining albeit not particularly ambitious adventures in this series, tales that possess a kind of retro Weird Tales patina evoking the work of Manly Wade Wellman. (For comparative purposes, interested readers are directed to the three volumes of Wellman's stories recently made available by Night Shade Books.) But unlike Wellman's stories, which are determinedly supernatural, Sheffield—in his role as scientist and advocate of rationalism, and in accordance with the character of Dr. Darwin—first sets up a fantastical explanation for his conundrums, only to explain them away with careful chains of logic and scientific facts. With Asimovian clarity and ingenuity, Sheffield seeks to prove that the universe is strange enough without adding extra layers of mysticism. This message places his book—for all its antique setting and ostensible vampires and ghosts—squarely in the mainstream of science fiction.
But any such messages are secondary to the sheer tale-telling. Sheffield crafts intriguing puzzles, then steps us through them in careful and deliberate episodes. As befitting a less hectic age, there's a leisurely flow to these plots. Darwin can always halt the adventure for a huge meal or a fine wine or sociability with his peers in the Lunar Society. But when action is required, Sheffield can supply that too. Such scenes as the behemoth's attack on Loch Malkirk or the struggle in the flint quarry are quite exciting.
What carries these tales even past the occasional over-obvious moment (any modern reader, hearing a description of the effects of the curse in "The Heart of Ahura Madza," will instantly think "Ah-ha, electricity!" long before Sheffield reveals the secret) is the characterization. Darwin—something of a forerunner of Sheffield's recent fat gourmet detective, Rustum Battachariya—is an amiable, opinionated, fascinating fellow. The saturnine Jacob Pole is a perfect foil. And the various supporting characters flesh out their roles well. And although the depiction of the era is superficial—not inaccurate, just not overly deep—a sufficient sense of the roots of the Industrial Revolution (which in its turn birthed science fiction) comes across.
