George Griffith - Life

Life

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 as a clerk addressing envelopes and mailing labels, submitted a synopsis for a story entitled The Angel of the Revolution. It remains his best and most famous work. It was among the first of the so-called marvel tales, epitomised by Jules Verne. Marvel tales featured such things as heavier than air flying machines, compressed air guns, submarines, profoundly convenient political developments, wooden heroes with no readily apparent sexual tastes, and spectacular aerial combat along with other forms of combat, such as battle under the sea. Very similar to the future war tales of George Chesney and his imitators along with the political utopianism of William Morris's News from Nowhere. He wrote a sequel, serialised as The Syren of the Skies in Pearson's Magazine. It was later published as a novel titled with the name of its main character, Olga Romanoff.

Although overshadowed by H. G. Wells in the United States, Griffith's epic fantasies of romantic communists in a future world of war, dominated by airship battle fleets, and grandiose engineering provided a template for steampunk novels a century before the term was coined. Michael Moorcock claims that the works of George Griffith had a dramatic impact on his own writing. The concept of revolutionaries imposing "a pax aeronautica over the earth", at the center of Angel of the Revolution, was taken up by Wells many years later, in The Shape of Things to Come. Wells himself once wrote that Griffith's Outlaws of the Air was an "aeronautical masterpiece."

Though a less accomplished writer than Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells, his novels were extremely popular in their day, seeing many printings. Griffiths stories foreshadowed World War I and foretold of a communist revolution in the United States. It also predicted that Great Britain would ally itself with Germany against a Franco-Russian-Italian alliance. Almost the exact opposite of what actually happened when World War I started. Griffith also employed the concepts of the air to surface missile and VTOL aircraft. He wrote several tales of adventure set on contemporary earth, while The Outlaws of the Air depicted a future of aerial warfare and the creation of a Pacific island utopia. Sam Moskowitz described him as "undeniably the most popular science fiction writer in England between 1893 and 1895."

His science fiction depicted grand and unlikely voyages through our solar system in the spirit of Wells or Jules Verne, though his explorers donned space suits remarkably prescient in their design. Honeymoon in Space saw his newly married adventurers exploring planets in different stages of geological and Darwinian evolution on an educational odyssey which drew heavily on earlier cosmic voyages by Camille Flammarion, W. S. Lach-Szyrma, and Edgar Fawcett. Its illustrations by Stanley L. Wood have proved more significant, providing the first depictions of slender, super intelligent aliens with large, bald heads — the archetype of the famous Greys of modern science fiction. His short story The Great Crellin Comet, published in 1897, was the first story to not only include a ten second countdown for a space launch, but also the first story to suggest that a cometary collision with the earth could be stopped by human intervention.

As an explorer of the real world he shattered the existing record for voyaging around the world, At the behest of Sir Arthur Pearson, 1st Baronet, completing his journey in just 65 days. He also helped discover the source of the Amazon river. This was documented in Pearson's Magazine before being published as a book Around the World in 65 Days in 2009. He died of cirrhosis of the liver, at the age of 48, in 1906.