The first fandom

[Administrator]

The human intellect! It's an omnivorous Thing Engine that chews up anything fed to it and spits out the useful and the beautiful. You plug a disease in one end, you get a cure; you plug in ideas, you get a story; you plug in the universe and you get physics, smartphones, lasers. Everyone loves lasers.
But what happens when you take things that the intellect has spat out and put them back in? What happens, for instance, when you feed it a story? Plug in the Lord of the Rings and you get debates about whether the first dragon, Glaurung, was built wholesale by Morgoth or perverted out of a snake. Plug in Game of Thrones and LOTR, and you get debates about whether Smaug could take Balerion in a fight. In short, you get fandoms.
But fandoms are relatively new, as far as the history of the human intellect is concerned. Older than smartphones, more recent than steam power. Last month I talked about how HG Wells popularised turn-based wargaming; this time I want to talk about how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle caused fandom.
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