Sherlock Holmes does not believe in ghost stories; instead, he is one of the new breed of thinkers who appear in fiction during the Industrial Age, who point to the success of the scientific method in banishing superstitions and finding rational explanations for unusual phenomena. Of the problem surrounding the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, Holmes exclaims, “It is evidently a case of extraordinary interest, and one which presented immense opportunities to the scientific expert” (9). In Holmes’s hands, a tale of terror gets reduced, like a chemical reaction, down to a pure solution of greedy murder.

The idea of the supremacy of reason became popular in the fiction of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Dracula, published four years before the Baskervilles novel was serialized in The Strand magazine, pits an ancient monster of legend against modern scientist Abraham Van Helsing, who reasons out how to vanquish the demonic creature.

In 1895, HG Wells published his masterpiece, The Time Machine, an early work of science fiction that imagined time travel as a technical possibility during an era of rapidly advancing scientific discoveries. The story’s hero, the Time Traveler, discovers a far-distant future in which humans have devolved back into a culture of slavery.