Publisher's Synopsis
No Description Available George Griffith (full name George Chetwyn Griffith-Jones; (1857-1906)) was a prolific British science fiction writer and noted explorer who wrote during the late Victorian and Edwardian age. Many of his visionary tales appeared in magazines such as Pearson's Magazine and Pearson's Weekly before being published as novels. Griffith was extremely popular in the United Kingdom, though he failed to find similar acclaim in the United States, in part due to his revolutionary and socialist views. A journalist, rather than scientist, by background what his stories lack in scientific rigour and literary grace they make up for in sheer exuberance of execution. "To-night that spark was to be shaken from the torch of Revolution, and to-morrow the first of the mines would explode...the armies of Europe would fight their way through the greatest war that the world had ever seen." From Griffith's most famous novel 'The Angel of the Revolution'. He was the son of a vicar who became a school master in his mid twenties. After writing freelance articles in his spare time, he joined a newspaper for a short spell, then authored a series of secular pamphlets including "Ananias, The Atheist's God: For the Attention of Charles Bradlaugh." After the success of Admiral Philip H. Colomb's 'The Great War of 1892' (itself a version of the more famous The Battle of Dorking, Griffith, then on the staff of Pearson's Magazine, submitted a synopsis for a story entitled 'The Angel of the Revolution'. It remains his best and most famous work. It was the first synthesis of the 'marvel' tale epitomised by Jules Verne, featuring futuristic flying machines, compressed air guns and spectacular areal combat, the 'future war' tales of Chesney and his imitators and the political utopianism of Morris's News from Nowhere. He wrote a sequel, serialised as 'The Syren of the Skies' in the magazine and published as a novel under the title of its main character Olga Romanoff Although eternally overshadowed by H. G. Wells, Griffith's epic fantasies of romantic anarchists in a future world of war dominated by airship battlefleets and grandiose engineering provided a template for steampunk novels a century before the term was coined. The influence of books such as "The Angel of the Revolution" and the character of Olga Romanoff on British fantasy writer Michael Moorcock is striking
