Michael Chabon writes an open letter thanking his seventh grade English teacher, Ms. Goode, who changed his life. Chabon describes how she assigned the class to write a story. Chabon had just read the Sherlock Holmes pastiche “The Seven Percent Solution,” by Nicholas Meyer, and was inspired to write his own Holmes pastiche.

“I decided that Holmes and Watson would take on Professor Moriarty, who had built an ironclad warship to terrorize the seas, and that they would naturally be helped in this mission by Captain Nemo, from ‘Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.’”

That sounds like a pretty damn good idea for a story.

Chabon endears himself to me by namechecking Philip Jose Farmer in a footnote — Farmer is one of a couple of dozen writers who had a prominent reputation in 20th Century science fiction/fantasy and who seem to have been largely forgotten today. Farmer was one of my favorite writers — particularly his Riverworld series — and Chabon reminds me that there are still a few of Farmer’s books that I have not read.