Sherlock Holmes wasn't the first master detective (that honor probably goes to Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin, who in his first case worked out the murderer was a knife-wielding orangutan), but his exploits pretty much perfected the genre. Arthur Conan Doyle created a character whose impossibly rational mind and superhuman powers of observation and deduction made him transcend the sixty original stories in which he appeared to become one of the most famous people of his era, real or fictional. Conan Doyle's stories may have remained mostly rooted in reality (although a man partially turned into a monkey, mention of the giant rat of Sumatra, and Holmes's almost superhuman physical prowess pushed the boundaries at times), but later writers have found that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson fit in just as well in far more fantastic settings. Here now are but a few of those stories.

Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century does pretty much exactly what it promises to do, transplanting a recently unfrozen Sherlock Holmes to the year 2104, where he teams up with a robotic Dr. Watson and a descendant of his Scotland Yard contact Inspector Lestrade to take on a clone of his arch-nemesis, Professor James Moriarty. This animated series set out to do reasonably faithful adaptations of the original Conan Doyle stories, except with more flying cars and a much prettier Lestrade (which really were the two main flaws of the originals, to be fair). Although the opening titles seemed to go to exorbitant lengths to prove that, yes, this really is Sherlock Holmes and he really is in the 22nd century.

Of course, the Filmation series BraveStarr actually does one better with its two-part episode, "Sherlock Holmes in the 23rd Century." Here, Holmes falls through a time warp to the year 2249 during his climactic battle with Moriarty, who then freezes himself cryogenically so he can continue his battle with Holmes in the future. Galactic Marshall Bravestarr from the planet New Texas enlists Holmes's help in tracking down a kidnapped boy. Not to give anything away, but anyone want to guess which recently unfrozen Victorian supervillain might be behind the kidnapping?

Lest you think that this sort of thing was limited to animation, the 1987 CBS TV movie The Return of Sherlock Holmes involved private detective Jane Watson, a descendant of the good Doctor, discovering Holmes having cryogenically frozen himself to avoid dying from a dart tipped with bubonic plague. The movie tried to tackle some important questions, such as what would happen if Sherlock Holmes went into a pornographic bookshop? (Answer: Hilarity would ensue.) The concept never became a series, although a different bunch tried pretty much exactly the same idea with almost exactly the same title six years later with Sherlock Holmes Returns.

At this point, I'm sure you're wondering, "This Sherlock Holmes stuff is all well and good, but what about John Cleese?" Well, The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It involves the Monty Python legend as the detective's grandson, Arthur Sherlock Holmes, as he investigates the murder of a thinly disguised Henry Kissinger with the rather counterproductive help of a bionic Doctor Watson. The word "bionic" is pretty much the only reason I'm including this. Well, that and John Cleese.

David Dvorkin's Time for Sherlock Holmes also places the detective in the far future, although this time Holmes gets there via immortality, which he notes with some regret has made him rather more rigid in his thinking than he used to be. Conan Doyle isn't the only author from whom Dvorkin freely borrows; Moriarty manages to catch up to the eternal detective using H.G. Wells's time machine. And that's not the only Wells/Conan Doyle crossover out there - Manly Wade Wellman's Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds follows Holmes, Watson, and another Conan Doyle creation, Professor George Edward Challenger, as they take on the Martian invaders. Unlike the Wells book, which finds humanity utterly defenseless against the alien menace, Holmes and company spend pretty much the entire book kicking Martian ass. If only Steven Spielberg had used this version of War of the Worlds...

Star Trek: The Next Generation famously placed Data in the Holmes role as he tangled with a holodeck Professor Moriarty in "Elementary, Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle." Sure, the real Holmes and Watson never showed up, but Data and Geordi La Forge made for two very reasonable stand-ins. For that matter, Data didn't even need the holodeck to get his Sherlock on – just a ludicrously out-of-place pipe, some painfully stilted dialogue, and a highly amused Will Riker.

Oh, and Spock quotes one of Holmes's most famous lines in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country when he says, "An ancestor of mine maintained that if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains – however improbable – must be the truth", which totally implies Holmes is his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather or something. You know, come to think of it, I can sort of see the resemblance.

Speaking of "Elementary, Dear Data", apparently there was some rule in the late eighties/early nineties stipulating that every show that includes the great detective had to use this same formula for its title. Thus we have The Real Ghostbusters and "Elementary, My Dear Winston" as well as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and "Elementary, My Dear Turtle." I suppose now is as good a time as any to point out that Sherlock Holmes never actually, you know, said those exact words in any of the original Conan Doyle stories. Still, when we're talking about mutated, super-intelligent turtles falling through a time slip and helping Sherlock Holmes recover an atomic clock from Moriarty before he can somehow use it to change history and declare himself the emperor of the world, a slight misquote should probably be the least of my logical issues.

Moving to Doctor Who, although the Doctor has never shared the screen with Sherlock Holmes, that doesn't mean they haven't had an adventure or two together. The biggest was the seventh Doctor novel All-Consuming Fire, in which the two team up to take on the chaos god Azathoth. At the time, there was even some thought of making Holmes and Watson the Doctor's new companions, which I guess they decided was just too nutty, even by the standards of nineties Doctor Who novels (not that that's necessarily a bad thing). And, although there aren't any explicit mentions made to the great detective, the Doctor's costume in the The Talons of Weng-Chiang, complete with deerstalker cap, is clearly inspired by Holmes.

There are plenty of anthologies of Sherlock Holmes stories with science fiction elements, so I won't attempt anything more than a general sampling of what's out there. For instance, in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenburg, you can find Dean Wesley Smith's "Two Roads, No Choices", which involves time-travelers from the 21st century asking Holmes to investigate why the Titanic never sank, which I'm going to assume ends with a certain master detective introducing a certain unsinkable ship to a certain iceberg. There's also Josepha Sherman's story "The Case of the Purloined L'isitek", which features super-intelligent horses called Shrr'loks that live on the planet Kholmes under the rule of a pony that acts an awful lot like Sherlock Holmes himself – none of which technically involves the man himself, but it deserves mentioning if only for the sheer insanity of the premise.

Isaac Asimov edited the anthology Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, which among others featured two stories by the late Philip José Farmer set in his Wold Newton universe: "The Problem of the Sore Bridge - Among Others" and "A Scarletin Study". Holmes's ancestors were among those affected by the radioactive meteorite that hit Wold Newton, Yorkshire in 1795, along with pretty much every other character in the history of literature. The first story deals with that most impossible of ideas - three cases Sherlock Holmes failed to solve - while the second story finds the detective finally meeting his match in the form of a German Shepard with a 200 IQ.

Sadly, Asimov never really tackled the character himself, despite being a proud member of the Baker Street Irregulars, the preeminent Holmes appreciation society. Still, he did write a short story, "The Ultimate Crime", involving his puzzle-solving Black Widowers characters wherein a Holmes enthusiast asks them to work out the precise topic of Professor Moriarty's famed physics The Dynamics of an Asteroid. Since the hypothetical solution involves blowing up the Earth, I'm counting it as just sneaking over into science fiction territory.

Holmes has also made his fair share of appearances in comics. Perhaps his biggest role was in Warren Ellis's Planetary, in which he agrees to mentor series protagonist Elijah Snow in the secret history of the world that he had helped shape. The fiftieth anniversary issue of Detective Comics finds Batman along with some of the DC Universe's other great sleuths taking on a bunch of Moriarty's descendants. After they wrap up the case, Sherlock Holmes himself shows up to congratulate them and acknowledge the Dark Knight as his true successor. I've got to say, he's looking pretty good for 135, but something is definitely a bit off with Batman's mask.

There was also this past week's Sherlock Holmes/Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which was reasonably diverting if beset with a couple unfortunate Americanisms (you'll never get me to accept Holmes would say "pants" instead of "trousers"). He only appeared in one scene of the Victorian public domain character orgy that is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which has since expanded to include pretty much every fictional character ever created), as writer Alan Moore acknowledged that Holmes was, along with Dracula, just too big a character to place in the midst of an ensemble, since he'd simply take over the whole story. Still, his presence looms large over that entire enterprise as well, with both Moriarty and his brother Mycroft Holmes playing major roles.

Tangles with superheroes are no longer limited to the pages of comic books, however, as last Friday's Batman: The Brave and the Bold ably demonstrates. Everyone's (well, Graeme's) favorite lighthearted Caped Crusader finds himself summoned by Holmes to Victorian London to help clear the name of the lovably demonic Jason Blood. Since the show isn't called Sherlock: The Brave and the Bold, Batman does outwit him once or twice, but Holmes holds his own in a fight with the week's villain (who, refreshingly, is not Moriarty), and at the end Batman declares Holmes "the world's greatest detective." You said it, Bats.

Jerome McDonough, an assistant professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, notes that our society has amassed over 369 exabytes of data, which includes art, business transactions, and correspondence. McDonough fears that this reliance on digital storage will lead to a “digital dark age” in which all this data is destroyed or rendered unreadable. While the physical records of previous eras are susceptible to destruction and decay, our digital media are far more vulnerable:

Contrary to popular belief, electronic data has proven to be much more ephemeral than books, journals or pieces of plastic art. After all, when was the last time you opened a WordPerfect file or tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk?

"Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date," McDonough said.

Magnetic tape, which stores most of the world's computer backups, can degrade within a decade. According to the National Archives Web site by the mid-1970s, only two machines could read the data from the 1960 U.S. Census: One was in Japan, the other in the Smithsonian Institution. Some of the data collected from NASA's 1976 Viking landing on Mars is unreadable and lost forever.

McDonough and other digital archivists are working to find ways to preserve our cultural legacy, but there are challenges. Proprietary platforms, for example, protect intellectual property, but create a greater risk that the media will be unreadable to future generations. It may be time to consider a discipline in digital archeology to develop tools to ensure the future readability of media across all platforms.

'Digital dark age' may doom some data [Physorg via Futurismic]

• Big Guy: If you haven't read Frank Miller and Geof Darrow's Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot oversized graphic extravaganza, then you need to go out and pick it up right now. We'll wait. Ready? Okay. Big Guy is an over-armed, over-achieving battletank complete with his own boy scout do-gooder companion, Rusty. Now, the secret is that Big Guy is actually pilot by Lieutenant Dwayne Hunter, so he's not really a sentient robot. However, the world at large doesn't know this, and if you assemble a robot army, you're going to want to fight in it, right? Well, here's your e-ticket. We'd take him over Voltron or the Power Rangers megabot any day.
• Maxmillian from Disney's The Black Hole: This blood red robot could hover and had whirling blades at the ends of his arms... what's not to love? Sure he had good old laser blasters, but when he could turn your guts into a blended smoothie, who cared about guns? His ominous, scary head terrified me as a kid, and he'll do the same to human ground troops. Just keep him away from circular saws and other cutting tools.Oh, he also serves as a handy storage device for deposed megalomaniacs as well, in case you find yourself needing that sort of thing.
• Nixon from Hard Boiled: Geof and Frank also collaborated on the amazing Hard Boiled, which features more destruction and mayhem than a Michael Bay movie, all in intricately drawn in Geof Darrow's "obsessive attention to detail" style. Armed with just a handgun and his bare (later robotic) fists, Nixon cleaves his way through just about everything you can imagine, including giant barreling cars and a dog with laser beams for eyes.
• The Iron Giant in KickAss Mode: Have you seen The Iron Giant? This sadly unappreciated film was directed by Brad Bird for Warner Bros. animation, and really deserved a larger audience. The quirky 1950s retro-setting was perfect for this story about a lost alien robot superweapon who winds up on Earth and wants to be Superman. Of course, when he went haywire and turned into a giant gun that could take out anything, that's when he was at his most awesome. Of course, the movie wanted you to think that was bad, but we think it's incredible. Bring on the big guns!
• The Robot from Lost in Space: He may not have had a name (although his crate said ONE General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental ROBOT, so he might have been GUNTER), but he was loyal, always at the ready, and able to shout "Danger!" whenever something alarming was about to happen. Plus he was a perfect foil for that nebbishy Doctor Smith. Now, the Lost in Space movie might not have thrilled everyone (I actually enjoyed it), but the updated Robot in that (with the same voice) was a badass with plasma blasters attached. Both versions had treads, waving arms, and a giant round head. What more can you ask for? Well, step one would be to order him to destroy Matt LeBlanc.
• The Terminator from The Terminator: You can't really make a list of badass robots without including the Terminator, but which model do you pick? All of them? Only one? The T-1000? The Arnie models? The Summer Glau-bot? We have to go with the original from the first movie, because he was much grittier, to the point, and without a sense of humor. Plus he could growl out "Fuck you, asshole" better than any of the other models, who apparently had their language sanitized.
• Soundwave from The Transformers: Screw Optimus Prime and Megatron, even though either one would be a more powerful, logical choice. No, we like Soundwave because of his awesome voice. Who didn't want to talk like an old-school Cylon? Plus he could transform into a Walkman and fool all of your friends. Plus the cassettes became his recon sidekicks. The toy was a lot more heavily armed than the version in the cartoon, and a lot more badass. He had a microphone that could turn into a missile launcher. What more do you need? "RAVAGE, EJECT. OPERATION: ASS-KICKING."
• The Gunslinger from WestWorld: There is probably nothing scarier than a relentless Yul Brynner-bot without a face chasing after you relentlessly. Except maybe two of them. Just like the Terminator he never got tired, had a fast-walking pace that never faltered, and was always ready to blow your head off. Yul Brynner's own face was steely enough to be frightening, but once his own face popped off exposing the transistors and wires beneath he was nightmare-inducing.
• The Killbots from Chopping Mall: Originally released as Killbots, this Roger Corman produced film features three security robots going haywire in a mall in California and chopping everyone into shreds. Plus they had those creepy Cylon-esque red eyes which just meant they were up to no good. Strangely, it'd didn't do too well as Killbots, but they released it again as Chopping Mall, and it brought in some bucks. Not a blockbuster, to be sure, but check out what a gory name change can do. These are the guys you'd want on the front lines, cutting through the infantry so the big guns can sit back and wait.
• Ultron from Marvel Comics: Not only is Ultron one of the most ultimate killing robots ever devised, he also has a grinning visage that will scare the crap out of you just by seeing it. Granted, he was a bit unstable and the Avengers seemed to have no problem taking him down again and again, and he was even created by one of their own. However, if you can get past his epithet shouting, revenge driven programming, he'd make a good asset to have if you ever need to talk someone to death.
• Mechagodzilla: You've got to have one giant weapon you keep in reserve, ready to bust out and make everyone pee their pants just when the time is right. Who better than Mechagodzilla to do that? In fact, trot him out in his Godzilla disguise first, and then you have people thinking "Oh crap, it's Godzilla!" Then once they think they've defeated him, but actually just destroyed his fake Godzilla skin, you've got people thinking "Oh crap, it's Mechagodzilla! Screw it, we surrender." Built by aliens, he's a badass robo-copy of Japan's mightiest protector.
• Major Motoko from Ghost in the Shell: If you ever want to see a woman take on a tank all by herself with nothing more than an automatic rifle, then look no further. Sure, she's a cyborg with some cloaking technology, but that hardly makes her any less badass. As a field commander on the ground, Motoko could issue commands and kick ass at the same time. Of course, she'll also obsessively leave the field to follow up on Puppetmaster clues and hints, but that might be a small price to pay for her skills.
• HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey: You'd need someone to run the numbers and come up with strategies while all the fighting was going on, and who better than good old, red-eyed HAL back at the base crunching scenarios? Of course, the downside is that is things start looking like they might threaten HAL at all, he'll pull the plug on everyone else to save himself. However, he'd explain it to you in that calm, easy cadence, so you probably wouldn't mind at all.

• Johnny Five from Short Circuit: This guy couldn't kick any ass, so make him zip back and forth in a shooting gallery style and let your 'bots with distance weapons take shots at him.
• David from A.I.: If you want to train your bots on how to capture kids and hold them for ransom, use good old David-bot and his Teddy for some games of hide and seek in urban settings. Just be gentle, because the kid could hardly eat spinach, let alone take a pulse-rifle blast to the spine.
• V.I.N.C.E.N.T. from The Black Hole: Okay, I'll say it here, I have a true soft spot for this movie, and for V.I.N.C.E.N.T. However, he wouldn't have been too effective as a soldier (unless you had just offed his buddy B.O.B... continually), so if you put him out to pasture for target practice, at least he'd be doing some good. Sorry, little buddy *sniff*.
• C3P0 from Star Wars: R2D2 may be useful enough to keep around in an engineering or repair bay somewhere, but C3P0 was useless. No speed, no weapons, and a mouth that wouldn't quit? Use him for hand-to-hand combat training and see how many languages he can say "Not in the face!" in.
• Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation: Come on, how annoying did this guy get? Surround him in an open field and let the whole crew go to town. Keep spare parts around so you can repeat this over and over.

There have been so many Pinnochio-bots in science fiction: Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man, Haley Joel Osment in A.I., Chip in Not Quite Human, Annalee in Alien: Resurrection, NDR-113 from The Positronic Man by Asimov and Silverberg, and Roy Batty (sort of) Blade Runner.But most people would automatically say Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation is the purest expression of the Pinnochio-bot mystique. After all, he spent seven TV seasons and four movies exploring humanity over and over again. And his quest took him through comedy lessons with Joe Piscobo (the zen master of comedy), painting, Shakespeare plays and Gilbert & Sullivan comic operas. He probably tried to be a male stripper in between episodes.

But really Data is just a knock-off of the original wannabe human, Questor from The Questor Tapes, Gene Rodenberry's 1974 TV movie. Yet another one of Gene Rodenberry's failed TV series ideas after Star Trek, Questor is about an android who's built by a group of scientists using parts and plans from a mysterious genius Dr. Emil Vaslovik, who's gone missing. The android is a roaring (well, intoning) success, with one problem — his programming is incomplete and he doesn't develop emotions. So Questor goes in search of Vaslovik.

Various people are searching for Questor, and B.J. Honeycutt gets accused of having stolen the android. At one point, B.J. tries to stop Questor, who almost kills him to make his escape. But then Questor realizes that killing is wrong. Yay!

Questor's creator, Vaslovik, who turns out to be a super-advanced android himself, the penultimate model in a long line sent before the dawn of humanity to guide us in the proper course of development, blah blah blah. Vaslovik dies, but not before entrusting Questor to B.J. Honeycutt from M.A.S.H., who promises to teach Questor human feelings: Can you just imagine the weekly episodes, where B.J. teaches Questor another important lesson every week? Actually, you can, because it would have looked a lot like the Data-centric episodes of ST:TNG.